Actively looking for web and mobile developers

rpglogger.com is a project I plan to build and enhance for many years to come, with tweaks and enhancements delivered a few times a year. I will gladly continue to work on it whether or not anyone joins up.

However, today I got some great news when I realized that we got enough notes on StackOverflow's Open Source advertising post that we're now getting free ad placements for developers from StackOverflow for the next six months!

So if you're a web or mobile developer, take a look at the github repo, and the milestones that we currently have open to see what I already have planned. I'd love to take this experience and put it on tablets and other mobile devices.

I was already planning on spending a month or two this summer enhancing rpglogger, and cranking through several of the open issues - now with additional community exposure, I hope we can further amplify that effort!

Current state of rpglogger.com

Just a quick note. Severl visual updates, and a few tweaks to rpglogger have been done in the last few months as I use it to log my progress through Skyrim.

In my personal log, I've got 427 items across 19 categories (books, journal entries, locations, ingredients, etc.) and it's been a great way to record all that.

There are some things that rpglogger really needs, however:

• Overworld map support - an image that you can add locations to as you discover them
• The ability to tag items with a location (so you can record where a unique item, for example, was found)
• Real-time search across your log
• Sharing/collaborative strategy guides

And a couple of other nice things, like supporting login across Twitter, and other login systems. I probably won't get to any of this in the near future, but I plan to resume work sometime in the summer (June or July), and I'm taking pull requests on the GitHub repo.

However long it takes, I do plan on keeping this project up for the next several years, as I'm a fan of the Elder Scrolls games (and RPGs in general). Since Heroku can easily handle this project on their free tier, and I don't think we'll be surpassing the free tier capacity any time soon, I figure rpglogger is a great project to just host and enhance slowly over time.

Early development screenshots for rpglogger

rpglogger.com is a labor of passion by a gamer who happens to work as a web developer.

Here are the first three development screenshots. The site is live, and open users. All you need is a Facebook account to log in. I'm two weeks into development, and there is much functionality yet to come.

First version:

• Initial navigation and layout
• Preview of filter/meta boxes
• Demo, lorem ipsum text

Second version:

• Refreshed some of the fonts
• Added background image
• Added site shout-out at the top of the page
• Demo, lorem ipsum text

Latest version:

• Refresh on the fonts (now using Google Web Fonts)
• Re-done layout+navigation
• Overall look & feel is fairly close to final, mostly working on site functionality from here forward, though there will be a few visual enhancements
• Actual, live data shown

The reason I created rpglogger

I don't like strategy guides for games like Skyrim.

My favorite thing about games like Skyrim is the discovery and experimentation elements. I started to play on launch day, but then stopped after only a couple hours.

Why would I stop playing one of the best games released in a long time? I realized that I wanted, for the first time, to get into the nitty-gritty of alchemy, crafting, and other things in the game. At first I tried to make a handwritten log of people, places, and ingredients, but that broke down very quickly. The game is so huge, that it's just not a practical way to approach the problem.

So, I spent the last week building rpglogger.com - it's basically a way to log your progress in a sort of "build your own strategy guide" sense. You create a 'log book' where you can add/edit/delete 'sections' in the book (e.g. NPCs, quests, items, locations, whatever you want), and define your own integer/text/string/boolean attributes on those sections. For example, if you want to track ingredients, you can add a 'string' field for the name of the ingredient, and 4 string fields, one for each of the effects it has in alchemy. That's just one example.

So, why didn't I just buy the strategy guide, or use GameFAQs.com? I don't like those approaches for games like this, because I feel it ruins the discovery elements by giving you all the answers. I needed a middle ground between handwritten notes and having all the answers.

So, there it is. One gaming geek's story. Right now Facebook login is supported. I plan on adding Twitter, and OpenID providers pretty soon. Right now you can add as many people/places/things as you want. Soon I'll be adding a realtime text search/filter box to quickly find objects, in addition to tagging support. I also built it specifically with the idea that I'd be running it in full-screen mode on my laptop, in the browser, while playing. So, there's dark background/visual theme, and limited need for scrolling.