Plot Points
I’ve been curious about Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) since My Chemical Romance released the music video for their song “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” in 2004. The video starts with a small monologue from the band’s lead guitarist, Ray Toro:
“You like D&D, Audrey Hepburn, Fangoria, Harry Houdini and croquet. You can’t swim, you can’t dance and you don’t know karate. Face it, you’re never gonna make it.”
My 12 year old brain didn’t know what or who half of those things were, but my favorite band thought they were cool so I was going to find out. Of the list, D&D has remained something I think is very interesting.
So when our Project Manager, Adam Wright, suggested a virtual table top (VTT) application for our final project at DigitalCrafts, I was stoked. With everything we learned over the last 17 weeks, we can definitely make this work and even work in some stretch-goals. So we did just that — we got to work!
Adam and I started on the backend while our teammates Mauro Stoic and Vinny Vecchio tackled the frontend. We created models for the resources, rooms, scenes, and users, as well as the tables that would join those to the rooms. We migrated over that info and seeded some data to get started. From there, it was mostly connecting our work in the backend to the frontend to make it all functional.
At this point, our frontend team had already created many pages and styled those pages. We had buttons and input fields to work with, so it was fairly easy to pop in and write a few lines of code to get it functioning with the ElephantSQL Database. Around this time, I came down with a cold that turned into bronchitis and was out of commission for two days. I owe a big thank you to my teammates for pulling together during that time!
Once I got back, I went to work reloading components instead of refreshing the whole page. This made our app a lot faster and cleaned it up, making it look much more professional. I added in some feedback from the app when you add players or type in an incorrect email. I deployed the frontend of our app on Render. The last few days was a lot of polishing and nitpicking, then we were done!
The hardest part of the project for me was working with so many people. Everyone has their own work process, their own standards, their own preferred methods. Even though it’s a challenge, it’s also a major strength. This project wouldn’t be a quarter of what it is today without the teamwork it took to get it there.
