Fun & Games

testing testing…

Next up, testing an in page edit off my blog 😀

I’m eating m&m’s, watching an animal crossing playthrough on youtube, and messing around with code. Next up is dinner, a Just Dance battle with my daughter, and then working in my journal 🥰

Auto-generated description: A social media interface featuring a feed with posts and user interactions, displaying a left sidebar with navigation options.

Auto-generated description: A cozy room features a TV displaying the game Animal Crossing on a wooden entertainment center, with decorative plants and a person's feet resting nearby.

I finally have a moment to myself and Im going to enjoy the Halloween festivities on my island.

I had a wisdom tooth removed today. So it’s a play animal crossing new horizons and eat applesauce kind of day.

I have a pumpkin spice latte and I’m listening to animal crossing new horizons music. Time to be extra productive at work ☕🎃🏝️👩🏻‍💻

I Created Some DCC Character Sheets

Looks like my little gaming group can get together this weekend to play some Dungeon Crawl Classics, DCC. Yay! During our last game I noticed that we spent just as much time looking up what the characters can do versus actually playing the game. I think that’s because we only get to play every four-six weeks which is just enough time to forget everything. So I hunted around for some good fan-made character sheets that actually explained what a character class/race could do. There were a couple of options that were close to what I wanted, but I ended up just drawing my own.

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I restarted my animal crossing new horizons island a few days ago. This time I’m not going to unlock the terraforming tools. I feel like I have the best intentions with them, then it all becomes a mess until I’m so irritated that I delete my save file. 🏝️

Finally, tomorrow is the magical day that all schedules align and we can actually continue playing our dungeon crawl classics game. I know what I’m prepping for the rest of the evening ⚔️🐉

I have reached the point in my day where all I want to do is drink a cup of tea and play animal crossing. Unfortunately I still have a whole lot of adulting hours left to go 😅

Dev Diary 0012: January 1st - 16th 2024

I’ve spent the last few weeks of the New Year, like a lot of others, reflecting on where I’ve been and where I want to go. So this update is a little more rambling than most.

Work

I want to never use Azure Dev Ops again. It is giving me such a headache. I still can’t get our release pipeline working after upgrading our solution to .NET 8. Entity framework is complaining and its convoluted and not my strong suit.

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I just spent an hour teaching my mother, 70, how to play Animal Crossing New Horizons 💕. She says it’s much better thank Mario Kart 😂

Dev Diary 006 - Week of November 6th

This week was back to pretty much normal now that everyone is over their colds and now that my wisdom tooth is gone 😄

General Development

So far this year I've tried a handful of ways to track my tasks. Both physical copies inside of journals and on post-it-notes. A couple of apps too, like Notion or Zoho Notes. Still haven't found a system that sticks around for more than a few months. So on a whim I did some searching and came across:
 

Which made me want to switch back to paper for now. Then my mind jumped over to difference to tracking my knowledge versus my tasks. I tend to mix the two together and then have my little nuggets of knowledge get mixed up with unfinished tasks or tasks, infused with knowledge, discarded when done. I find this most often occurs with my development work. Which circled me over to one of my familiar topics that I revisit every couple of years. Creating a personal wiki. And whenever I think wiki, I think TiddlyWiki.

Turns out I'm not the only one who thought of maybe hosting one on Micro.blog

I came across this video next. A little meandering but I really enjoyed it.

Now that video brought up a term that I hadn't heard in a long time: Quine. A quine is a computer program which takes no input and produces a copy of its own source code as its only output. Which took me back to my first foray into learning about the indieweb and thinking I might like to start a blog. I built a little self-saving HTML engine back then. The code isn't the best, but it worked.

I wonder if I could code my own little TiddlyWiki clone and make a little personal knowledge management system out of it. Hmmm 🤔

Which meant I almost immediately started a little local project to see if I could get something simple up and running. I'm making use of:


It's still rather undefined at this stage. I want it to be a quine like TiddlyWiki, because that seems like a fun concept. I want to use web components to get a bit more familiar with them. I want to be able to tag notes and support backlinks. I'll share more as I play around and build things out.

Hexcrawls and Dungeon Crawl Classics

I'm running the players through The Dark of Hot Springs Island, which is a hexcrawl. It's basically a play style where you have a map, a bunch of random tables, and then you piece together what happens while the players explore. This particular one has tons of tables, plus a dash of objectionable content I want to filter out. So I wanted to see what was out there to make this as easy as I could to run.

I found this neat little program called Hexdescribe where you can describe the map and create a bunch of random tables to apply to the areas on the map. The syntax to build these out it pretty simple and powerful. The map I came up with is this:

text font-family="monospace" font-size="1px"
0103 ocean
0104 ocean
0106 ocean
0107 ocean
0202 ocean
0203 dark-green village "HS-01"
0204 ocean
0205 ocean
0206 dark-green trees "HS-14" 
0207 ocean
0302 ocean
0303 dark-green trees "HS-02"
0304 dark-green trees "HS-05"
0305 dark-green forest-mountains "HS-09"
0306 dark-soil mountains "HS-15"
0307 dark-green keep "HS-19"
0308 ocean
0401 ocean
0402 dark-green trees "HS-03"
0403 dark-soil mountains "HS-06"
0404 dark-green forest-mountains "HS-10"
0405 dark-green forest-mountains "HS-16"
0406 dark-green trees "HS-20" 
0407 dark-green trees "HS-23"
0408 ocean
0501 ocean
0502 dark-green village "HS-04"
0503 dark-green trees "HS-07"
0504 rock "HS-11"
0505 dark-green forest-mountains "HS-17"
0506 dark-green forest-mountains "HS-21"
0507 dark-green trees "HS-24"
0508 ocean
0601 ocean
0602 dark-green trees "HS-08"
0603 dark-green forest-mountains "HS-12"
0604 rock "HS-18"
0605 dark-green forest-mountains "HS-22"
0606 dark-green forest-mountains "HS-25"
0607 ocean
0702 ocean
0703 dark-green trees "HS-13"
0704 ocean
0705 ocean
0706 ocean
0707 ocean
0802 ocean
0803 ocean
include gnomeyland.txt

Which displays the island the adventure takes place. Though I did need to tilt it to make the hexes line up.
image.png


The next thing I did was take the random encounter tables and hex descriptions and add them in. But that produces a lot of text. So I altered it to use global variables and display information for only one hex at a time. It does require me to go in an update the location of the players each time it runs, but I find it worth it to have a much more concise output. Here is a sample of what my output looks like:


Water Imp: Init +6; Atk claws +5 melee (1d4) or water jet +10 missile fire (2d6); AC 16; HD 2d8; MV 40’ or swim 80’; Act 1d20; SP chill water (when submerged, may freeze 20’ diameter sphere of water to subzero temperatures), vulnerable to fire and heat, elemental traits; SV Fort +8, Ref +8, Will +8; AL N.

  • Init 18; HD 14; Dilute,Simmer,Wave
  • Init 7; HD 9; Pool,Globe,Spout

Interesting Flora:

Constrictor Vine: Roots that resemble pale hair grow outward from central bush for 30’ to 50’, then constrict back. Reshape and destroy areas. Edible berries.

The Rusted Hydra (hs-16-01)

Ancients

A spire of basalt 30’ tall, 20’ in diameter, and covered in smooth vertical channels rises from an overgrown slope. A red-brown statue of a seven-headed hydra stands atop the spire, mouths agape in a frozen roar toward the sky. Rainbow-colored flowers bloom thickly around the outcrop.

And a sample of the code that produced that:

;Explore Hex
1,
Weather: [[same type] [same currentWeather]]
Wandering Encounter[[same type] Wandering Encounter]
Interesting Flora: [Interesting Flora]

	
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Schedules aligned and we managed to fit in a DCC game last night. The players finished Sailors of the Starless Sea and each had at least one surviving character. impressive! Now I’m tossing them to Hot Springs Island to see what happens 🎲🐉⚔️

table with game master screen. The screen has four panels with rules from dungeon crawl classics. There is a laptop open with a fantasy map displayed. There are snacks, dice, and pencils on the table

Dev Diary 0005 - Week of October 30th

Job Related

This week ended up being a short week as well so I didn't quite get through my to-do list as I planned. But I still managed to straighten out the application permissions and role creation (which groups common permissions together). I wrote several more unit tests and started mapping out a QA test plan. My boss said one of the help desk employees will help out testing application so I want to make sure that testing is approachable and that we have a good way to track issues in Asana (the project management system my company uses).

General

Sick kids, sick husband, sick me. Though I avoided the head cold that was going through the rest of my family my wisdom tooth infection was pretty bad. So I got it removed on Thursday. Ouch.

Side Project - Lillihub

Besides playing Animal Crossing, I worked on my side project and updated it with a couple new things and all the changes I wrote about from last week. 

The biggest one I think people will like is side swiping images (when there are multiple) on small screens. I tried getting it to look good and work well on a large screen, but horizontal scrolling is just a difficult UI monster at that size without resorting to JavaScript. So I played it safe and only did the swipe on small screens. I'll continue to ponder how to make it work desktop users. 

In general, on the server using a DOM parser I check each post for multiple images. If I find multiple images I save a reference to that image (or the anchor element if the image is in an anchor tag) and then remove it from the DOM. Then I create a new div container with the css markup I need and append it to the bottom of the post, placing each image inside.

It isn't 100% perfect, if the underlying blog post had malformed HTML tags, or really small images... things can look a bit strange. But overall it works as I expected.

I did get rather frustrated trying to implement "last seen" functionality. I kept running into issues setting a cookie with a post id. I'm not sure if it's because I was doing it inside a GET request or if it's because I'm using chunked transfer encoding or something else. I'll need to dig into this. 

Here are the other things I did:

  • The post editor now has spellcheck enabled
  • The post editor now has a character counter
  • Made UI consistent across bookmarks, bookshelves, manage blog area with same action button format as the posts
  • Manage blog posts now shows the full text of the blog post for long posts as well as short posts
  • The permalink for the post is now above the comments
  • Added in a favico.ico
  • You can now unmute and unblock users (from their profile page, under Advanced)

Also, lots of little bug fixes everywhere. Some from when I refactored and some that were there all along.

I also released the source code! Yay! 

I'm not sure why showing people my code, outside of work, bothers me. Imposter syndrome? Spending too long as a solo developer and developing bad coding habits? Maybe.🤷‍♀️ But in any case. It's up there for people to take a look 😄

Until next week,
Loura

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Idea: Mini-adventure cards

I’m rather excited to run a Dungeon Crawl Classics game in a couple weeks. I’ve been making some mini-adventure cards to have on hand for inspiration. After trying out a couple of card sizes I think I like the 5inx7in format the best.

Journal page with 5in by 7in rectangle containing an adventure concept and map for a Dungeon Crawl Classics game.

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I absolutely love my new journal cover. Animal Crossing is my jam and I thought I’d missed my chance since this design was released before I had a Hobonichi journal. But my husband surprised me with it this week 😊❤️

Journal cover with animal crossing design

I’m looking forward to family game night tonight 😁

Tabletop game - dungeon crawl classics

My son is getting ready to run his first d&d campaign with some friends so I’m spending the afternoon helping him scale and print out maps. He’s responsible for all the cutting and taping together. 😁

Session One - Portal Under the Stars - 1.1

This contain spoilers for the Dungeon Crawl Classics level 0 funnel adventure The Portal Under the Stars by Goodman Games

To go to the start of this adventure visit my post - Dungeon Crawler Classics - Solo Play

Session One

portal in the trees during a starry night with a doorway

Being a peasant is hard but maybe your luck is about to turn around. The stars have aligned in a strange pattern and that old tale you heard so long ago maybe wasn’t as foolish as you thought. Sure enough there is a shimmering portal right in front of you, just outside of town near that old and strange rock formation. There are riches there, you’re sure of it. And you’re not so sure it’ll still be there if you take the time to wander back home and grab more supplies. It’s been a hard and long winter and didn’t the tale promise vast riches inside? You decide it’s time to take a chance and make it big. So you step through the strange bluish light and to your utter astonishment it looks like a good dozen or more of the town’s folk had the same idea as you. You shuffle closer towards them into the stone hallway and unconsciously group up next to some familiar faces. At least you don’t need to ransack the crazy war-wizard’s hideout alone.

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Dungeon Crawler Classics - Trying Out Solo Play

I haven’t played a good table-top, dice slinging, rpg game in about six years. So the urge to play has been building for a while. But my schedule is absolutely packed to the brim and my old game friends also have schedules that are equally packed. There isn’t a way to fit in a gaming session with any regularity. Then Wizards of the Coast pissed off a huge portion of the D&D community with some rumored changes to their OGL and I decided to look around and see what else was out there. I came across several new-to-me rpg systems and I wanted to give them a try. Could I somehow play one by myself? Turns out many others have had the same thought and there are quite a few different ways to go about it.

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