My first hobbyist programming project was to enhance my D&D game with a system for determining the prices of in-game items. To reach this goal, I built up a pipeline of tools which generated terrain with elevation, moisture, temperature, and climate; used pathfinding to construct a road network; rendered the world map as a vector-graphics file; and specified "recipes," like this one, delineating the raw materials and labor needed to construct each purchasable trade good1.
Pouring thousands of hours into a sprawling project over two years solidified my love of programming, expanded my brain, and got me seriously writing on the Web for the second time2. However, as the work of a beginning developer, "the economy project" is sloppy.
Today, I embarked on the grand adventure of converting this project into a proper (web) application. It's hard to explain all the work which will be required, but I can see the end result in mind. Here are some of the changes I'll make:
- The original project could only be run on my computer. The new version will be accessible on the Web.
- The original project was only able to output its final product (the trade-goods pricing tables). The new one will provide more of the game-world information it uses internally, including that pertaining to towns, roads, and terrain.
- The original project required me to change a parameter in the source code to output prices at a different city. The new one will allow one to simply enter a different town name in a dropdown list, and may also permit comparison between prices at multiple cities3.
- The original project didn't cache the prices of intermediate goods which fed into many recipes' final price. The new one will use caching wherever possible.
- The original project ran every layer of code (terrain, pathfinding, import/export, pricing, recipe evaluation) each time the main program was executed. The new one will use a database to reuse each player's results, only re-running a given layer when its source code has changed.
More details can be found on my old blog, 21st Century D&D. One day I'll port those blog entries and the game rules over here, for archival purposes, for rewriting into better game material, and so I can finally redirect that domain.↩
The first time was a blog I wrote while studying abroad. The third and final time is this website.↩
As the app evolved toward a full-fledged game platform, with players logging in to make characters, it could be arranged so that only characters with sufficient mercantile knowledge would be able to view this screen.↩