Esoteric Update #316 - An Update About A Different Project

Okay, it's update time, and we're taking a slight detour. Now, as you may have noticed, the title indicates that a new project is using my engine. I've mentioned this project before; to be clear, it is not my project. But I'm helping with it, of course, as the designer of the engine.

The project belongs to Bear (from my Discord server), and I'll let him speak about it in a moment. I'll just do my update first. It's not huge because I've been tutoring Bear on how to set up an instance of the engine for himself, and actually, part of what I did was for his project rather than my own.

But let's go over it!

1) The game now has a full-screen mode. It just makes things feel more official.

2) The game can now display dialogues to open files, save files, and open folders - this is necessary for Bear's program.

3) There's some new UI CSS for handling space-filling elements. I'll show it off later because I never got to implementing said elements; I just tested the CSS raw.

I've also been writing a lot again. Most days, writing now comes more easily, and I've perhaps learned not to worry if anyone wants to read it or not. I might try to write erotica again this week.

And now I leave things to Bear.

First off, I should apologise that this update is late. I ended up doing something stupid where I thought about what my project will be doing but not what it will be called. So provisionally let's just call it for what it is: the Nameless Game Master's Toolkit. I'll come up with a proper name for it when I can, I thought I could select something for today but nothing really came up that I liked.

In any case, I like D&D and I like using computers to help with D&D. So I'll be making a generic, system agnostic Toolkin for RPGs. Personally I'll be using it for D&D so that's where we'll start but that's not necessarily what it has to be for. I've already put a fair deal of thought into the system, how it can be expanded and customised, and how Eso's engine is specifically very good for it. In essence it will allow a game master to organise information into groups, generate random content on the fly (and before game) and also share content from the organiser with their players using human and machine readable cards. That last feature means that the cards can be shared between game masters (over Discord for example) and allow for the reconstruction of the entry/data from the image. We'll probably be starting with items, as that is something I find myself needing in my games quite often (you know those pesky players and how they desire to loot everything not nailed to the ground).

As Eso has mentioned, this will be a separate project. I've tried to help her with her game, but to be honest I'm just not a good enough writer to tango with her and that's mostly where she needs help. Thus I doubt this will be any detriment to her work if I step down and do my own thing.

And of course I am very grateful to Eso for being acomodating. She basically implemented everything I asked for on the same day that I asked and has been very supportive of the idea. Which I assume is because this project was always partially based on the idea that it would be expandable and usable by other people. Though maybe not in the way I want to use it.

(Eso's note: Yep, he's right on all accounts there.)

We're still unsure how the updates will look. Possibly there will be an once a month update from me and then the normal weekly updates from her. Possibly I'll just move it elsewhere, as a separate project, maybe even GitHub. But we'll work something out. I'll likely be posting about it on her Discord too.