Hey guys, I have never programmed in my life, but I now want to make an app for rpgs.
The main idea is to make a dice roller, inside a character sheet storage… It’s just supposed to help me store and edit my stats and let me roll and and add stuff.
Best case scenario would be using Termux for this, since it’s supposed to run on older smartphones.
I’d love some guidance where to start!
So making an app when you’ve never programmed before is a big undertaking, but not impossible. You mentioned termux, so are you looking to make a command line app? That would be the easiest place to start. A simple cli dice roller is a great beginner project.
Beyond that, how do you envision the character sheet part working?
It’s just supposed to show the status of my character. I want to enter short commands for different stats. Ie asking for health = it shows my hitpoints and wounds I received. Asking for skills = it shows how much I have to add to my skill checks. And of course dice rolling, with adding numbers. Those don’t even have to be direct stat rolls, like “roll dex”, but just “roll 1d10+4”.
That’s it. I will use an old phone for this, mounted to my arm as a cyberdeck, and want to make it visually like 80s hacking. Basically with the visuals of coding.
I used to work for a ttrpg company. A dice parser is not a small undertaking. You’re basically writing a calculator with an embedded random number generator. It’s fun but not an easy first project. My advice would be to keep it simple to start with and have your command interface (repl) just accept simple roll commands like roll dex and that handler knows how to make a dex roll. Simple roll commands like roll d6 are also easy to parse out with just a regex. Honestly, I think you would be better off writing a gui app and give it a retro hacker look than going with some type of terminal. Typing on phones is a pain vs tapping buttons.
Thanks for the advice! I am not a big fan of carrying my heavy laptop around, but are probably right about writing on a smartphone
Yeah that sounds pretty doable.
Of course, stuff like “add X to inventory” And add hp would be good as well
you could check textual, it’s a TUI framework that yields quick results.
Thanks! Do you know if the end product will run on android?
it will run in termux and on anything that can run a full python. Also you could run it remotely via ssh. Textual also offers a web interface to access apps via browsers but I never looked into that.
Thank you! I’ll look into it
If you need a UI, flutter is great, but for a complete beginner it has a bit of a learning curve.
Maybe you could start with a small PWA (progressive web app) using Javascript or typescript. You can do it all in the front-end for something small like this, though you won’t be able to implement some features like synchronization across devices
If you would like to use a TUI this you can check out ncurses. Should be a lot simpler than an GUI.
You should be able to do that with a game engine like construct https://www.construct.net/en , phaser or godot. That’s pretty easy even for beginners
