

I don't like strategy guides for games like Skyrim - normalocity

My favorite thing about games like Skyrim is the discovery and experimentation elements. I started to play on launch day, but then stopped after only a couple hours.<p>Why would I stop playing one of the best games released in a long time? I realized that I wanted, for the first time, to get into the nitty-gritty of alchemy, crafting, and other things in the game. At first I tried to make a handwritten log of people, places, and ingredients, but that broke down very quickly. The game is so huge, that it's just not a practical way to approach the problem.<p>So, I spent the last week building rpglogger.com - it's basically a way to log your progress in a sort of "build your own strategy guide" sense. You create a 'log book' where you can add/edit/delete 'sections' in the book (e.g. NPCs, quests, items, locations, whatever you want), and define your own integer/text/string/boolean attributes on those sections. For example, if you want to track ingredients, you can add a 'string' field for the name of the ingredient, and 4 string fields, one for each of the effects it has in alchemy. That's just one example.<p>So, why didn't I just buy the strategy guide, or use GameFAQs.com? I don't like those approaches for games like this, because I feel it ruins the discovery elements by giving you all the answers. I needed a middle ground between handwritten notes and having all the answers.<p>So, there it is. One gaming geek's story. Right now Facebook login is supported. I plan on adding Twitter, and OpenID providers pretty soon. Right now you can add as many people/places/things as you want. Soon I'll be adding a realtime text search/filter box to quickly find objects, in addition to tagging support. I also built it specifically with the idea that I'd be running it in full-screen mode on my laptop, in the browser, while playing. So, there's dark background/visual theme, and limited need for scrolling.
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shaggyfrog
Based on how you described it, your users will have to reinvent a wheel for
each game. If you could provide templates for the most popular games -- or a
way for templates to be crowdsourced, shared and edited -- you'll probably see
quicker adoption.

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normalocity
Yup, I agree. Ways of sharing among players is definitely part of the plan. I
also agree with the templates idea. Currently, when you sign up you get 4
default sections (locations, quests, journal, and characters), to which you
can add as many as you like. I'll be adding more default sections in the
future based on the game support.

The initial demo is definitely focused on the needs of Skyrim, and I'll be
expanding it from there.

The list of already planned project milestones can be seen here:
<https://github.com/normalocity/rpglogger/issues/milestones>

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phzbOx
Cool. I do agree that official guides are sometime annoying as it gives you
all the solution instead of just giving you the hint needed to continue. Good
job :) Looking forward to see how it progress.

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normalocity
Thanks. I'm really looking forward to fleshing it out.

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nostromo
This is fun, great work!

Note that I'm able to see (and remove) other people's notes on the site, which
I don't think is intended. (Unless those are pre-populated as examples.)

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morpher
You don't even have to be logged in to see/edit other people's notes...

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normalocity
Yep, I'm fully aware of the authorization stuff - CanCan will be added over
the next week or so.

It is basically a demo right now, and I'm playing around with it. I will be
putting limits on this very soon. Having demo data in there (though there
isn't much) is sort of meant to show what it can do.

Thanks for dropping by!

