Story Games and Talking Heads
Hey friends,
The end-of-school madness is upon us. This time of spring is a fever-dream of ALL the events happening at once combined with everyone trying to tie a bow on the last academic year. Stay strong, friends.
Things I Built
Several years ago, before we had bus tracking apps, I'd find myself waiting at the bus stop with my eager, elementary-school age daughters, sometimes up to 45 minutes. To prevent boredom we started playing 'story games', basically TTRPGs. I hastily cobbled together a simple set of rules and a dice-rolling app so we could play with nothing but our imagination and a phone.
My daughters are older now and we don't have that same kind of trapped time in the morning, but I recently was able to revisit and refactor that dice-rolling app as a way to experiment with Vue 3, Typescript, and CSS theming.
The goals were relatively simple:
- Audio feedback for rolls and results. (This was a core feature so I didn't even have to see the phone to know how the roll went.)
- Low 'fiddle factor'. (I didn't want the kids to have to punch a bunch of buttons to make rolls.)
- Quick results. (Nothing like halting the action to count pips...)
- Big, chunky buttons. (Everyone loves a chunky button!)
Some stretch goals were:
- Expanding to other systems. (Blades in the Dark, Powered by the Apocalypse, and even D&D).
- The ability to freeze certain dice and reroll. (I mean, you could theoretically play Yahtzee with this now...)
- Persistent settings, now saved locally. (Thanks to
localStorage.) - Timestamps for log entries to help figure assist in recall.
We have fond memories of those stories we told together, and hopefully we'll be able to build even more! You can check out the updated version here:
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https://nathan-long.com/hero-dice/
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Interesting Web Bits
- Microsoft released an incredible yet terrifying tool called VASA that can synthesize a 'talking head' video from just a photo and an audio clip.
- Jake Archibald shows us the difference between attributes and properties
- Loglog gives us a fascinating rant on why Rust isn't great for game development.
- How do you accidentally run for President of Iceland?. Anna Anderson talks about how UX can lead to unintentional consequences.
- Some tips for Tailwind.
- Yiming Sun gives some some options in dealing with complex boolean values.