Larpwriter

Community Larp discussion
#21

[quote=“Judit”]Most app developers I know won’t even open their laptops for less than $10k upfront. Here’s a handy guide that I often refer to: howmuchtomakeanapp.com

So here’s my (hopefully) practical suggestion: this sounds like the of project that would be at home somewhere like Kickstarter to fund it. If there really is such a shortage of decent tools, it’s something I can imagine LARP communities around the world could get behind and crowd fund. We’d still need someone who is available / keen to make it, and it would still be a huge undertaking that wouldn’t happen overnight.[/quote]

So, I quickly got to $21k for an android app. Kickstarter is a great idea for funding this, though.

#22

As a long-time professional software developer I’m going to +1 Anna’s and Judit’s points. In software projects, you can have it good, cheap or fast - but you can only have two of those three. Given the suggestion to use high school students we’ve already selected “cheap”. Since the students won’t be getting paid, I expect they will do it “fast”. Which means it won’t be “good” (as in built to a design that is scalable, extensible, secure etc).

However, it does seems there are some features that people think could be added or improved. Knowing what works and what doesn’t work is useful, in case somebody in the community wishes to build their own Larpwriter application.

Whenever I’ve thought about what I’d like to use in a larp development application, the some features I would like to see are:

  • A visualiser that shows you the various relationships between characters and groups
  • A booking system so players can sign up to an event and get access to their character once it has been assigned.
  • A responsive web design so you can log in to the site and read your character info on your phone (no more printing screeds of character sheets).
  • A single-page application experience, without time-consuming postbacks (e.g. gmail, where the page is very dynamic).
#23

To add to this, the developer of larpwriter has been in touch with me as we have talked over the years and in New Zealand we have written a lot of games on the app and contributed to the costs.

He has offered me the source code for the existing Larpwriter which was developed using ruby on rails 2.3.

But he also had started working on a completely redeveloped version of larpwriter but stopped due to the birth of his child. The new version is opensource and Ruby on Rails 4, so it should perform better. And he is happy to give us access to develop it with new features and get it working if we have the developers.

#24

Do we have any Ruby on Rails developers in the community ? My skillset is on the Microsoft stack, unfortunately, although I might be able contribute in the UI if it is using Angular.

#25

Sophie and Dan Z.

#26

Okay , apologies for my 1980’s and students comments, but at least it’s got us talking about it some more in detail…:sunglasses: