What in the Heckin' Dungeon? Design Diary #2
This is part of a series about how I am designing What In the Heckin’ Dungeon?: a web app for tracking information tabletop role-playing game players need while exploring the world.
So I was going to make a fully functional and featured web app, and I wanted to do it right. The closest I’ve gotten to that so far is Keeper’s Repository.
I figured out the basics of that Keeper’s Repository, but I think my approach to designing it was very haphazard. I had only recently learned NodeJS, and in retrospect, I think EJS was a poor choice of templating language. I learned a lot, but not enough to finish it.
I had learned a lot more about web development since Keeper’s Repository, and I started learning some interaction design that hadn’t been covered in my university education. Now that I had a serious project in mind, I decided to really use what I learned in Human-Computer Interaction.
I didn’t formally define the requirements for What In the Heckin’ Dungeon?. I had a very good idea of the core requirement: provide a visual way to communicate information that often is left to the imagination in D&D. I also had a very good idea of what users I was designing for: gamers/nerds with various levels of experience and investment in D&D.
All the prototyping software I had used in school was designed for desktops. Given my current physical limitations, I needed a mobile-focused wire-framing app. Scope creep always in mind, I resolved to just pick one that would do the job. alternativeto.net came through with an iOS app called Mockup.
