The original idea for the app focused on helping Dungeon Masters keep an idea of whose current turn is it, and an overview of the player’s current state. I was using a spreadsheet in my own weekly game, and I felt like there had to be a way to make the same data smaller and more handy. The spreadsheet wasn’t replacing anything, it was just summarizing our data and keeping it all in one place. We are all using iplay4e.com (hey Andrew!) to keep track of our character stats. And dndinsider.com is invaluable for setting up encounters for that night. So all in all, we are a pretty electronics-heavy group. We tend to decide to use tech to help us when we find something that lets the numbers get crunched quickly and easily, so then we can spend more time in the game. It struck me that a DM’s helper would be a great idea for the iphone.

I drew up some wireframes and started going around to gaming stores and conventions and talking with people about my idea. Everybody was enthusiastic and eager. I began the project and started moving forward. At first I assumed it would be nothing more than a table sorted by initiative with the ability to track hit points. Based on play testing and feedback we realized we needed so much more. 4e is a big system with a lot of nuance. It isn’t easy to get everything in there, but we tried to focus on the things we knew that we wanted and needed. Even still, we couldn’t get everything in there and our launch date kept slipping. Finally I remembered my mantra from the web days, release early – release often. Plus, I wanted to get it out before GenCon.

So I wrapped it up and sent it off to the App Store and we’ve been running around like crazy people ever since, writing a user guide, responding to feedback, planning next releases, and working on our next app.

Then we got approved and started getting great reviews and functionality requests. Our early adopters are just the best. They are really helping us see what we got right and what still needs some work. We’ve had only one “meh” review (hi Theo!). Thankfully, a lot of the suggestions the reviewer wants are coming in future versions. While we want everybody to love our app and tell all their friends, it is also important that we know what people feel like we could do better.

Despite our testing, which we thought was pretty thorough, one of our users found a bug in our first week – so frustrating, when we thought we’d tested everything. We fixed it within hours of when it was reported, and that bug fix version has been sent to Apple for approval.

We knew there might be mixed reviews, because it happens to everyone, but we’re really thrilled to have 5-star average rating right now in the App Store, which is great for a 1.0 version. A huge “Thank you!” to everyone who reviewed.

In summary, we know that this product is going to be a “long tail” product for us, which means that it will have a small volume of sales, but keep selling a few every day for a long time. We made DM’s Tracker for the love of the game, and hoping to give back to a community that we really cherish.

We are trying to offset our costs, but it will take a long time to accomplish that. So we are working on new apps as well and hoping that we can continue to please people with our little apps.

In related news I sent out download codes to some of the bigger D&D sites with high hopes that they will be willing and able to give me feedback. Having community leaders step up and help us make the app even better is pretty exciting stuff.

So now I’m starting to talk up the app and let people know what we’re up to and what we are doing. In a nut shell I’m going to continue focusing on the D&D side of things and my wife, Angela, is going to be looking into the Astrology side of things. She’s already become my personal Astrologer with suggestions around launch times and so on. If she has more thoughts around this all I’m sure you’ll be seeing them here.

So now I get to start using this blog to talk about all sorts of things, but mostly it’s going to be about D&D 4e and iPhone applications that make that world flow easier. Our very first app was born from my personal frustration with tracking all the various things that needed to be tracked in your average D&D combat session. Not just initiative, hit points and defenses but also conditions and effects. Combat in 4e is complicated and I’ve seen a lot of elegant solutions for keeping track of who’s marked and when effects end or cause damage. I started out with a spreadsheet but it quickly grew more and more complicated. Suddenly I found myself mis-marking damage or not advancing a character’s turn properly. So I decided to really put my head down and fix the problem, with an iPhone.

As the application has moved along I’ve grown to really love and appreciate the D&D combat system. I’ve learned a lot about how it flows and works and places where it bogs down. During our play test sessions while using the app I’ve sadly discovered that we made some design assumptions that turned out to just not be true. So we needed to scrap a line of development that was painful to lose, but totally worth it. The new way we are doing things makes much more sense to me and as we add features it will scale much better.

Every time I use DM’s Tracker I can’t help but smile. I get a chance to see all the characters involved in combat on the screen with a basic overview. A tiny heart icon pops up when they are bloodied and a little sad face when they are dying. It’s just adorable, oops – did I say that out loud? DM sadism aside, it’s a very fun and useful tool and I’m totally committed to expanding it out and growing it into something really amazing.

The next big project is going to be working on the PC Tracker. That’s right, the ability to track the things that are most important to you around your character. Right now there is only one app in the D&D iPhone app market that does something even close to it and it’s a great little app. If you don’t know it already, check out iplay4e.com to see what’s there. You can upload a character data set from the Character Builder and have your character right there. But for as much as I love it, I want it to do something just a little different. I need somethings more often than others and I want to UI to work with me a little better. There is plenty of room in the market for two apps like this, so I’m excited to be stepping up to the plate. We are likely to take a very different approach on this one and release early and often, once we figure out which direction we are going. We are still trying to decide if it needs to be Character Builder data driven or not. We need to figure out if it is more useful to have your entire character sheet in your iPhone or just the parts that change often. Plus, since there is only so much data we can push up there before we run into copyright issues, we have to figure out a way to work with that.

Anyway, I just wanted to take a moment to come out of my shell and say howdy and let you guys know what’s coming down the road. Some really great things lie ahead.

If you want to go check it out jump on in (will launch itunes store).

I still feel like I’m catching my breath here, but needless to say this is incredibly inspiring and exciting. For me it was a gentle reminder that every ending is just the a new beginning, even if we can’t see it yet.

here is where you pick you events

Detail Screen

Ok, I feel a little more free to talk about our first application now.

So we’ve released a little app called “Artcharts Astrology 2009″ out into the wild. We have no idea how long it will take Apple to get back to us with approval on our billing information or our app approval. So let’s talk about the application itsself. It is a very basic daily “what’s up in the sky” app. It pulls in local data from some xml files and shows you what’s currently happening in the sky. Then it allows you to drill down into an interpretation to see what those bits mean for you and yours.

Up the road we want to add in some search functionality and listen closely to feed back from our users. We decided to take the launch early and launch often approach to this first development project.

I’ve been working on a few different apps since November of 2008 and today was a huge milestone for us both. We could not be prouder of where we are today. Plus we can’t wait to show you what’s next. If you are a RPG’er who enjoys using electronic tools to get your geek on at the table then you are going to be very pleased with what’s next.