Thursday, July 02, 2009

Complications Abounding



Well it's taking some time to finish the Player registration form on the Elthos Web Application. Why? Because it's kinda complicated. Let me explain, briefly. You can logon and have no account, so you'll want to register. When you do you create a User. You'll then be sent to the Player Info screen where you can add information such as whatever contact info you like and so on. This is to allow other players and the GM to go to the website and see how you prefer to be contacted. Now you want to select a Gamesmaster in whose world you'll have your character(s). Now you're a Player who is a member of a Gamesmaster's World, and you can do a couple of things on the site. You can Roll a Character for yourself and purchase your items and select your Skills and Mystic Powers, and describe your character and such. You can also go to the Reports page and print out your character. That's it for Players. However, now lets say you created a character in 'Joe's Amazing World' and you decide, Heck man I want to be a GM, too. So you go to the Player's page and pick "Is Gamesmaster" and sign up to be a Gamesmaster. Now you can create your own World and add Players. These would be your friendly neighborhood gaming friends who want to play in your World. So you add them to your World using the Player Info page. You can send them an email with their user names and passwords and now they can logon as Players (or they could go to the site and Register themselves). They can now roll their Characters, or you can roll Characters for them. So your Players can edit their contact info. You can edit their contact info too. Or they can choose to become Gamesmasters, but then I need for them to still be able to edit their Characters in your World. They can also decide, after having been a Gamesmaster, that they would prefer to go back to being a Player, and now I need the form to switch them back to being a Player, and going back to letting them edit only their own Characters in your World. But what if they want to play in three Gamesmaster's Worlds? AND be a Gamesmaster too? Woah. In programming terms there are numerous complex States to manage, and so the Player Info page that manages all this is necessarily complicated. A wee bit more than I thought at first glance. And so it's taking some time to figure out and complete. Such is the life of a programmer. That said, when it is done, I will be ready to load the completed version of Phase II online and get things going for the beta testers, which will make me mundo-happy. So, back to the salt mines.

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