Dicefire + Site Update - Design Workshopping
A quick check-in on what we've been up to this week with Dicefire and setting up a proper editor for rounds and essays.
This last week we’ve been diligently hitting the books with Dicefire and its ruleset. After about a handful of test scenarios and playthroughs, we quickly discovered a menagerie of gaps in the ruleset where the system didn’t have a clean answer. Oh no!
Going into next week, we’re going to be hard at work getting the ruleset as tuned in as possible, which is also going to lead to an overhaul of the gameplay as well. Not an absolute reset by any means, but significant changes to make the game as painless as possible for a tabletop exercise.
Making these rounds and essays less painful
One thing I’ve immediately noticed when trying to create the very next round is how painful it is to actually write something effectively so that things stay relatively uniform. My best foot forward was to copy and paste the first round, make changes, and go from there.
Turns out that’s really boring and tedious.
To ease that pain I started looking into how we could improve a technomancer’s experience writing these articles. I wanted to make it as breezy as possible. First thing I looked into were existing tools, but nothing seemed the right shape for what we had. Some of those tools just felt unnecessarily user unfriendly, which doesn’t abide by me too well. Don’t get me wrong, I’m an engineer. I’m used to technical, complex little things. But, I’m also an SRE and don’t like having to take a shot of tedium every time I touch a markdown file. Not to mention some of our team are more design focused than anything else.
So not wanting to waste too much time, I built an entire editor for The Alembic. Just a simple editor with quality of life features to keep everything tidy. It renders in the URL and lets you edit an article just as if it were on the site already. Screenshot example to show you what I mean! Best part is everyone can change colors of things on the fly, drag and drop images, and not have to worry about the back end of things.
…and we absolutely will be playing with the colors.
What's Next?
Other than our continued efforts with Dicefire, we will be making some additional changes to how we do things.
- Our sprints run 2 weeks. As of the writing of this round, we’re entering the second week of our current one. We will make a best effort to give end of sprint updates at minimum, but we may contribute more if something neat happens.
- Each sprint will showcase 1 singular project we are working on. This sprint, obviously, is Dicefire. We’d like to get this over the finish line reasonably soon without sacrificing quality. This way we don’t split our attention over 6 projects when we don’t have the manpower to handle that right now. Hoping to remedy this in the future.
- Our website will be undergoing a migration very soon. Hoping to reduce any downtime that a guest might experience. We apologize in advance. This is so we can get stronger security controls in place and make things easier for our own technomancers.