SSA-X2 Forums

I know your busy, and believe me, I don't want to take away from your amazing work with the dnd sheet, but I was wondering if you were ever thinking about making character sheets for other rpg systems?

If not (or at least not soon) what tips could you give me about making sheets that can do calculations and stuff like that?

To be honest, I tend to design products for the games I play. And so far that's been D&D almost exclusively for the past 7 years (though I did take part in a short Call of Cthulu campaign). I try to make my products as open to house rules and variants of the system as possible, but they really are D&D sheets.

I've thought about doing products for other systems, but frankly I need to understand the system to design a good product for it. And in order to understand the system to that level, I have to play it. So for now (since I'm going to be DMing a 4th Edition D&D campaign when the current 3.5e campaign I'm part of ends) it looks like it'll be only D&D for the foreseeable future.

With that said, tips... hmmm...

1. Understand the system. If you're not a rules monger, get some friends to play with who are. You need to know it pretty well to build a good product.

2. Use your own product, and have your gaming group use it with you. This seems obvious, but many programmers don't use their own stuff, and thus forget to make it usable for the average joe.

3. As far the actual programming goes... dissect what other people have done. Don't steal their work (or at least give them credit if you do), but look at their code to figure out how they accomplished it. I spent alot of time looking over MadIrishman's calculating 3e sheet before beginning work on my own.

4. Don't be afraid to ask for help, and look stuff up. I spent alot of time perusing the net for answers to issues I was having. I came across some good communities for dealing with problems (PlanetPDF.com is a wonderful PDF developer community), and had to spend alot of time with my face in JavaScript references to figure out how to do things.

5. Plan ahead. If you know the functionality you'd like, you'll save yourself alot of work. I've redone my various character sheet 5 times from scratch (both in design and code). Though this is natural, it wasn't until recently that I've gone into a redesign with a list of goals, and it's made the 4e sheet come together much better.

6. Above all else, do it because you enjoy it. I may have moments where I want to pitch my computer out the window in frustration, for the most part I build my products because I find it fun and challenging. I do it for me, and if other people enjoy it, all the better.

Sorry I don't have any specifics about coding specifically, but that's really something you have to delve into yourself. Feel free to come to me with any specific questions you might have.

Cool, thanks, I knew it wasn't likely you were going to have extra time when I asked, just thought it was worth the chance. I totally get how the whole busy with life (or current campaign) thing works!