Ironwood Omnimedia

This week I am coming off of a short little vacation, mostly of the mind. In essence, I needed to take a few steps back and look at some issues from a mind that was not dragged down with progress. I escaped from the constant grinding away at the code and design elements and did next to nothing for several days in regards to working on DPnP, or E-RPG as a whole. It paid off.

The character generator has had some serious issues, mostly design related. By stepping back and not looking at the problems at all I was able to make some attitude adjustments within myself. The attitude adjustments aren’t the flogging type. They are the types that revolve around an approach to a project. In this case, the approach was more complicated than what it needs to be.

The biggest problem is giving the player the ability to micro-manage everything. By doing so I found there was no really good and easy way for the player to do this. No matter what I did to the interface, things got worse, or just were clunky. In order to make things work, I scaled back on certain things. Now, the code determines certain things for you that makes it easy and accessible. That is, ultimately, what DPnP is supposed to be about anyways.

The second thing I am fixing is my approach to XML. A character has a llot of data associated with it, and that can take time to aggregate into an XML report. What I was trying to do was to use XML within the character generator so that users can create character sheets that they can use in the character generator. That put a large resource strain on the program that I didn’t like. My alternative, was to use some kind of text based report, but that was just silly, and ugly. So now, I am pushing XML to the back burner. XML will still be in the final build, but it won’t be used by the character generator. Therefore, if you want it, it is there. For the character generator, and the character sheets, I am just going with plain old HTML. I will also have a guide available at some point for creating your own character sheets for those who are adept at HTML and have the creative inclination to create their own sheets.

These problems now fixed, I can get back to work today implementing those strategies.

Until next time, Happy Gaming!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 7:32 am and is filed under Developer Blog, DPnP, E-RPG General Development, Player Character Creator. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.