Feelings About a Product Test Before and After
Posted by: Ruel Knudson in DPnP, Developer Blog, Player Character Creator, tags: character creator, Character Manager, character sheets, DPnP, game session, Modern Sagas, player character, XMLI have to be really careful here as I have a bunch of stuff I want to spill, but I have to be very careful about what I can actually release information wise so I don’t blow it for the future. Let it be said that the past two weeks have been HUGE on production, development, and overall goodness.Its actually Saturday night. I usually wait until Sunday morning to start my blog (and no doubt this will be stopped shortly and finished tomorrow). However, I have been waiting all week to start this post, and frankly, I can’t wait any longer.
First off, DPnP development is suddenly way beyond my assumption as far as progression is concerned. If, last week, you had asked me how far along I was on the CRM, I would have said about 80%. I am happy to say, from what I have seen this week, I am way into 99%. There is only one single feature that remains to be added, and that is XML.
Yes, that is right, the same XML I said would likely be cancelled is going to return.
Also, the character creator is about 45% along and that is a lot. The CC is about 1/10th the development size of the CRM (as it piggy backs alot of the code from that). I can predict with some confidence that I could move a good 10-15% of production along a week. That is major! What’s better is that it is now a full on Character Manager.
If I had just left it as a character creator I could say that it is about 90% done. However, I feel that it really needs to be fully developed as a character manager to be the product I want it to be. And that is alot. The sheer volume of goodness wrapped into this is beyond my ability to iterate at this point. However, I can say that at this point I have already dabbled with making new archetypes for Modern Sagas and Fantasy Sagas as well as cranking out some mooks and villains for tomorrows game. This is going to be fun!
<Monday, Following the Test and Game Session>
Well, today I am exhausted. Not because of testing. My daughter woke up in the night with a nightmare. This is the second of the two daughters to do this to me in two nights.
I woke up Sunday Morning in cram mode. My youngest’s birthday festivities took out much of Saturday’s finishing. Therefore, after waking up late due to the waking up in the night, I had about two hours to cram in those last touches, when I had hoped for at least twice that.
Things started off fairly fine. I got player characters input-ed quickly, with little fuss. I then did some tweaking to the character sheets to show some more detail. As things got later, problems started to appear, problems I didn’t have time to fix.
One problem was that certain skill groups would not appear in the skill selection list. Another problem was that a tweak to the character sheet broke another part of the program. While these were things we could improve around to get our game going, it was still groan inducing to have my players huddled around to get their new PC character sheets get mucked up by minor problems I should have had time to find and iron out.
My other big problem was getting the program out of my house and over to my friend’s where we intended to play. My USB drive was missing and he usually couldn’t get an Internet connection. Finally we get that sorted by me uploading it to the site and him getting just enough of a signal to get the file downloaded. Only problem, I am missing the updated DLL files. So I have to run to my house and upload those. Then we have to do the “Get a signal” dance to get them downloaded. Of course some minor new bugs show up that I can’t fix because we don’t have the software to do that on my friend’s computer.
Finally, after two hours we get them all updated. We download CutePDF (again a dance for reception) and get them printed, uploaded, then off to the office to print them (a quick walk that is so no big deal).
We finally get to playing. You know what, all of that drama didn’t hinder the simple fact that the information that the program prints is awesome. We had another new player this weekend. She didn’t have really any gaming experience so this was fairly new to her. She fit right in. Furthermore, all of the information that the character sheets gave her meant no rulebook flipping. She knew exactly what to do after a few minute of help from James.
A rule discrepancy occurred during play as well. This was concerning the Medicine Skill in Modern Sagas. The player question what the rule actually did. He reached for the game book and I told him to look instead at the character sheet. He had his answer on the third page.
By the end of this week, I hope, I should be able to get some screen shots up on this thing. That is how I will be best able to explain what it does and why it is a huge leap forward.
Anyways, I still have to write up my campaign log notes, so I am cutting this off. To close, I am still just as stoked about this as I was before the test. The minor bugs I fixed today already. A few larger (but not breaking) bugs are still left to fix, but that’s for tomorrow. The true test was not on whether or not the program would function, but would it help. It is a resounding YES!!!!!
