Ironwood Omnimedia

It has been a good week. A really good week. I still have been charging through DPnP and come closer to seeing it all come together. It is an odd feeling, having come from not knowing if I could do this, to seeing development coming closer to completion. It is a heady feeling, bewildering, and exciting.

I can’t really say with any surety what the release date will be. It is enough for me at this point to know that there will be one. DPnP was something I dreamed up a few years ago. I though I would have to give it up.  Life seems to have put me in the right place, at exactly the right time, with precisely the resources I needed to make it finally happen. I have met the right people, had the right discussions, and even those things in my life that seemed to be a hardship have all come together to conspire a way for me to make this all happen. And now, as I have this thing coming together in such a complete way, I can’t say for certain how I should feel.

Let me put it simply, I had very little programming experience. The dabbling I did with Never Winter Nights was nothing compared to what I have had to do here. Sure, it was a helpful primer. However, programming like this was way beyond any scope I thought was possible. I knew when I embarked on this trip I would have to try, but I have to say that my confidence was only so strong. I often feared that I would find myself way over my head, and floundering, would wind up having to give up all over again. That was my real threat. I don’t know if I could have regained the enthusiasm for the project if I had run into a wall I couldn’t overcome. And to be clear, some of the walls that loomed up looked nearly impassable.

More than once in the past few weeks I had to rethink my general approach, wondering if it was all still possible. One wall met another, and then another. However, like I said, I had the right resources. I read. I mean I read a lot. I dabbled and tried. I threw my hands in the air. I gave up twice. But, as with everything that is worth doing, you eventually come to a point where it all clicks. You just have to hold out for that point. And when it did, it clicked hard.

As I said with the last post, this is now down to just the legwork. The first real milestone will be a content creator that will populate the information for the character generator. Once that is done, there will be new trials, and new tests. I see the walls in the distance. But just to have even this semi-complete utility working and doing exactly what I want it to do is encouragement enough. 

I am sorry if this post seems a little odd, or like I am tooting my horn. It is just something I had to get off my chest. I don’t really go into how things like this feel. When I talk of progress to family and friends it is all about what was physically done, not how I got to this point. Please, don’t think I am trying to brag. I know that to real programmers the stuff I am doing will probably seem fairly basic. Still, I can’t help but feel proud that this thing is coming together, and by my own hand at that.

As for progress: The Content creator is made up of several wizards for creating each campaign resource type. Of those resource wizards I have 3 completely done. I have 1 more almost finished, and should have it done within a day or so. That leaves one more to do completely and another to finish up. That last one is dependant on the other. The only reason that one got started at all is that it depended on two other content creation types (3 wizards for those) so I thought it would be smart to start where I would need the most interaction between content.

Some wizards take longer than others. I finished 2 yesterday, one of which was started after I finished the other. The current wizard I started yesterday and may finish tomorrow or by Tuesday. The next wizard does not seem like it should be as complicated as the current one, but you never know. The final is a biggy and may take as long as the current.

After that, the wizards are done and I can build the actually resources. This is a simple matter of adding stuff from the books into the content creator, with maybe an extra or two just to show some love. There will still be more work to do on the content creator. However, that work is only for the release version. Right now I don’t need to do anything more than get Fantasy Sagas content created and saved. The other bells and whistles can wait until the character creator is finished.

That done, the file can be opened with the character creator (which just has to be set up to take the information). Last is setting up the export files (i.e. setting up the xml and print functions). The XML and print are still beyond my scope. That, like everything else, will be a learn as you go sort of thing. It has worked so far. 

And after I finnish these two, are we done? Not by a long shot. That just gives you a free Player Character Creator. The tru program, what I think will change everything, still has several more components to build. 5 more I think. Maybe more. Some are bigger than others. Some are absolutely huge in scope.

Still, not a single one of them is as overwhelming as the one that I had to start. The one where I knew next to nothing. Now, I know something. At this point, with my excitement up, I believe it is enough from which to build on to get the rest done.

Until next time…

Happy Gaming.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 12th, 2008 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Developer Blog, DPnP, E-RPG General Development, Overall Development, Personal Post. 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.