Recurse Center Week 2

Week 2 Recap#

Ok, this post is a few days late and it’s technically the start of week 3 now, but late is better than never! This post will likely be a bit shorter than the first one, mostly because I want to get back to working on my character creator. Last week I shared that I had three goals I decided to focus on:

1. A 5e character creator TUI
2. Learning Rust
3. Learning Wails & Svelte

I also shared that these were all subject to change, and sure enough they already have! I’ve decided that while there’s a lot I find compelling about Rust (especially when it comes to enums & pattern matching), I ultimately don’t enjoy actually reading or writing it, and if I’m going to learn something for “learning’s sake”, I’d like to enjoy what I’m learning! I also think I underestimated how much goes into a character creator. It’s for these reasons that I’ve decided to drop Rust from the list. Maybe I’ll come back to it in the future, maybe I won’t, we’ll just have to see!

Character Creator#

So I’ve mentioned this character creator several times now but haven’t really said much about what it actually is. Right now, it’s not much - just a listing of all 12 classes with the option to select one. You can see a short demo on asciinema¹. I’m using the 5e-srd-api as the data source and genqlient to interact with the GraphQL API. For the UI, I’m currently using a combination of charm.sh libraries, including huh and bubbletea. I may end up ditching huh and leaning more directly on bubbletea, as huh seems to be a little more limited than I realized; for example, there doesn’t seem to be a clear way to grab the current item the cursor is “hovering” over without manually keeping track of which group & input the form is at.

The biggest challenge, however, is figuring out how to model the character data. I knew going in this would be a bit complicated, but I figured I have plenty of experience manually creating characters so it couldn’t be that hard. I was wrong! There’s a lot of moving pieces to 5e characters that affect each other in a lot of ways, and figuring out how those pieces all fit together programmatically is a bit of a puzzle. Luckily for me, another Recurser (Eric Allen, check him out at Interweb Alchemy) had looked into this previously and gave me a few helpful resources to check out:

• a Roll20 script that imports characters from D&D Beyond, which looks like it will be helpful in getting a grasp on how other’s have solved this problem before
• a stack overflow post about character architecture

He also shared his D20 roller library which I may end up taking some inspiration from when it comes to ability score rolling².

Plan for This Week#

I want to have something a little more demo-able by the end of the week. I’m going to spend a lot of heads down time hacking away at this and see where I get, but I’m trying to not stress out too much about it. I’m also hoping the 5.2 SRD comes out soon, as I really like a lot of the changes in the 2024 rules update, and I’d like to use them for this project.