Errors, Bugs & Final Polishing

Ok Ok! So there were a few bugs that needed to be squashed, and that's to be expected. And of course there were a few minor issues with usability, but nothing too serious. And of course I wanted to make the look and feel a little nicer around the edges. So... I'm almost there. But not quite. Still some polishing to be done, and I'm going through the application page by page starting with a New User, creating a New World, and then proceeding methodically through each page in the application to make sure everything is ship-shape, all the numbers tie, and all the fuctions work as smoothly as possible. There'a lot there, so it's something of a large and tedious job, actually. But no matter. It must be done, and I must do it.

Overall, the application is working exceedingly well. But I'm a perfectionist and I hate to release something that has any flaws. So I'll fine-tooth-comb this for a little while longer. A week? Maybe. A month? Could be.

And then I will load it online.

But then what?

That's the question of the year for Elthos RPG.

All Systems Go

Having resolved the complications of the logon method I've gotten everything up and running well enough to release Phase II to the Online server. That will be a big milestone for the Elthos Project! Soon, most likely this week, I will be sending out a few discrete requests among friends-of-the-Project to do some closed beta testing, looking for obvious bugs and issues, and getting people to look at the system for the first time and provide feedback. I'm looking forward to this. But most of all I'm looking forward to having it online so that I can start to actually use it! That, my friends, will make me very happy indeed.

Also in the works, I sent on the Final Revision Request to my artist who is working on the Elthos Tarot Deck, which is the key to the Cosmological Map of the World. That took a lot of work, getting friends to review the cards and provide their thoughts, and then look over the entire mass and decide which recommendations I want to definitely ask for, and which ones I want to leave up to the artist. This is a arduous process, but in the end we'll have a great looking Elthos Tarot Deck. What for, you ask? Well, its a little complicated, but in a nutshell the Elthos Tarot is designed to help Gamesmasters keep the symbolism within the World coherent. It also provides some other uses, which I'll get into another time.

All in all the progress is good.

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.