At any one time, I probably have three to five personal projects (usually of the geek variety) happening at once. Some of these projects I find I’m not interested in anymore and they are scuttled to the bottom of the Sea of Dead Projects. Most of them are completed, but I keep to myself. The rest I deem worthy for public consumption and I release into the wild.
While it may seem counter-intuitive, I keep so many projects around to avoid burnout. I usually only have one primary project at any single moment in time, but it shares mind-space with several smaller distractions. These distractions allow me to stoke the creative fires when intense sessions with the primary project threaten to blowout the hearth.
Well, today, I present one of the distractions that avoided the Sea of Dead Projects and has been released into the wild:
SavagedTools
SavagedTools is a small, bare-bones application (semi-optimized for mobile devices) that combines card-based initiative, dice rolling (supporting aces & wild die, and hopefully any number of edges/hindrances), and a logger into one tool.
It uses a simple sign-on that only requires display and campaign names. There is no registration. This means anyone can access your campaign’s log or impersonate you, but the damage is minimal (just create a unique campaign name and don’t share it).
The sign-on allows your group to share initiative draws and dice rolls with each other in near real-time on the logger. Whenever the deck is shuffled or a player draws a card, the results are recorded in the log and the page is updated. Same thing with dice, and players can even assign a description to their roll.
What may be especially interesting is that all the important stuff happens server-side, so players cannot manipulate the results through JavaScript trickery. I’m also especially proud of the fact that random number generation is accomplished by using the API available from Random.org. Random.org uses atmospheric noise to produce true random numbers.
To keep my database size manageable, I’ve incorporated a routine that will destroy any data older than hour, so the logs are not permanent. Other than that, the tool is free to use and comes with no strings attached (for as long as I can cover the hosting).
I plan on re-using the dice library I wrote for my other online RPG tool, Venture Captain (a character generator for the Pathfinder RPG). So this distraction will also prove useful for my primary project.
Please check out SavagedTools and let me know if you encounter any issues.