Wastewalker has taken a number of years now of development, in part due to its status as a side gig. On a daily basis, I run a game store with my wife and friend and I program software for the store. As a part of all of that, I’ve written a pretty reasonable amount of software for use with Wastewalker as well. Today’s post is more or less just showing off some work going on to layout the book.
The lion’s share of the content exists right now in spreadsheets and databases, making it somewhat quick to edit, add to, subtract from, and update. Ideally, as things solidify, I’ll be able to offer an SRD-like package of the content, all prepped, ready, linked, formatted, the whole nine yards. Today? Its helping me with the prep for the book.
A formatting script takes the content stored and renders it as HTML and XML tags, which I get to dump to a file. With that, I load the file in to Adobe InDesign (CS5, I’m an old timey cheapo; its legit! Just…old!) which is all prepped up with tags and associations, linking the layout elements provided in the file to the HTML tags. Once it all pops in, everything is BASICALLY formatted and ready to go!
Once all of that content is in, the next steps are manual. I’m working my way through as much of that as I can, but though its time consuming its nothing too terrible. It involves me moving some items around, setting tables off to the sides, pulling blocks intended for sidebars out, and some other tweaking like that.
Each main chapter of the book exists as its own group of entries, allowing me to generate the “Feats” chapter, the “Races” chapter, etc. as needed. Being able to do so, then dump that XML into a file, allows me to (re)format the book file as things change. With each of these saved as their own files for InDesign as well, a master document ends up holding all of those together. The process allows me to update sections and chapters of the books quickly and easily, with some but minimal additional effort. Now, where this is going to get really fun is once we get to work on the Game Master’s Guide!
Thanks to Starfinder’s fairly programmatic methods, almost all of the creatures, traps, and a number of other GM-related options exist as templates in those database files. For the Game Master’s Guide, we’ll be able to generate some quick, varied, lists of creatures, traps, and challenges for the players. As adventures are produced, however? Whole collections of foes, customized traps, and more will be generated as a part of the scripted process, and then prepped and laid out as above!
Its a bit geeky and technical, but it is an exciting element for me as a developer. Doing this is going to allow me to rapidly generate content, sometimes from just rough outlines, to share with everyone. As a forever GM I have always found filling in details to be rough; with some assistance, I can outline our creature, our challenge, our adventure, and really focus on the elements that pop, elements that challenge or are unique, while the software can help fill in the gaps, holes, and finer details so that it all adds up, all makes sense, and rounds out the complete experience!
