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.

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.