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posts dated from: october 2016

Doodle Post

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Exciting Web Application Gifs

Exciting Web Application Gifs
I'm realizing that I find web development (to a certain extent) pretty relaxing but also still productive. It's still coding which is pretty fun, but it's waaay less intense on my brain than video game coding. I find myself able to work on web development sort of stuff for 6 or 7 hours a day which is about double of what I can do for video game programming usually.

Here's some exciting things I've added to my Pathfinder character sheet web application thing:

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Got a sweet health bar working to show how close you are to losing your character forever!

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Tracking all the skill points for making those very important D20 rolls. Also I have the ability to add custom skills for all those knowledge and perform checks.

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Armor tracking is important when praying to not be stabbed by a dragon's tail.

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And the rest of the combat goodies.

The last things I have to go are weight tracking, and the spell list. After that I might add some more features like a game master or admin interface to see all of the sheets, or possibly a basic account system to track your own character sheets. My plan is to release it to the public for people to use on their own servers (I don't want to end up hosting a billion character sheets if people are actually using this thing.)

The fact that I can work on web stuff for so long during the day I think has a huge impact. I often feel like I'm not being productive enough because of how many hours of game development I'm able to do day to day. Since I can do a lot more hours per day with web development I end the day feeling like I was way more productive even thought that might not necessarily be the case!

I should talk more about this kind of stuff in its own blog post though, probably.

Doodle Post

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Pathfinder Web Dev

Pathfinder Web Dev
Progress continues on my Pathfinder character sheet built with HTML, Javascript, php, mySQL, and css! Oh boy I love when I have to combine five totally different languages into a monstrosity. It's working out quite well though!

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I've built some cool systems to save and load the data on the sheet with some jQuery magic. I feel way more comfortable using jQuery than I usually do for some reason. I think something about it really clicked for me working on this for whatever reason. Maybe all my time in C# land has improved my programmer skill levels.

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The thing I'm most proud of right now is a generalized system for adding and removing things from a list. One of the limitations of our character sheet in PDF form is that we can't have dynamic sized lists of things. Things like our characters feats, abilities, gear, skills, and especially spells all suffer from hard limits in the PDF, but over here in the magical world of javascript I can make a list be any size by adding and removing rows on the fly!

I even worked out a system to save lists into the database and load them back out no matter what size they are. The best part is that I made it totally general case so whenever I come to a new part of the sheet that needs a dynamic list that can be saved and loaded I just have to add a submit button that's tied to the right javascript functions, and away it goes!

I think this break from game programming has been good for my brain so far.

Doodle Post

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Web Dev Side Missions

Web Dev Side Missions
I decided to actually take a break from some Sky Sisters stuff this week just like I told myself I would! I spent some time messing around with a web project that I've been meaning to try out. I'm working on building a Pathfinder character sheet that just runs off HTML and Javascript (and some other stuff to save and load the data.)

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I dug into a framework called Milligram which has been super handy in regards to getting a decent looking UI up and running quickly. Web development still feels super weird to me as it's combining like 6 different technologies into a single thing. Combining HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL feels like a giant mess but somehow it all comes together.