What Has Been Going On?
While game design for Lae has been on a temporary hiatus, I’ve been channeling my creative energy into a different avenue: worldbuilding and story development for a couple of Dungeons & Dragons campaigns.
Building a world from scratch—crafting maps, histories, and unique cultures—has actually sharpened the exact skills I need for Lae. D&D has kept my creative gears turning constantly. Eventually, I started wondering how I could use my development skills to make running these games easier for me and more engaging for my players. That thought sent me down a rabbit hole of custom app development.
Here is a look at what I’ve been building:
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The Virtual Notice Board: Designed for a campaign centered around an adventuring guild, this app replaces static images with a dynamic, visual bulletin board. I can populate, edit, and move parchment notices around, and players can click them to expand the full quest details.
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The Magical Cookbook: To help a player who wanted to play a "magical cook" (a concept D&D doesn't naturally support), I built an app to track ingredient inventories, manage recipes, and browse a catalog. It currently hosts over 160 ingredients and 14 recipes, and we successfully debuted it last session.
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The Shop & Economy App: To make shopping more engaging, this app manages multiple stores, item stocks, and pricing. I integrated a massive D&D item database and built a rolling system based on shop type and wealth to dynamically determine item rarity.
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The Loot Roller: Using that same item database, I built a quick loot generator scaled to party level and encounter rarity. I used it last session, and it cut my on-the-spot loot generation time down to mere seconds.
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The Obsidian Vault Companion: My biggest undertaking yet. This app provides a beautiful, graphic user interface for Obsidian, making world management and session prep incredibly intuitive. By utilizing front matter on my markdown notes, the app features robust filtering, custom views, and a dynamic session sidebar that tracks active links in a scene.
I’ve had so much fun building these that I am now exploring the avenue of releasing them to the public as a unified toolkit. I’ll be posting regular updates on that progress in the D&D Toolkit section moving forward!
What’s Going On With Lae?
Now for the headline news: I have officially resumed work on Lae!
All of this UI/UX development and worldbuilding breathed fresh inspiration into me. Because I’ve spent so much time optimizing menus and data structures recently, I decided to tackle Lae’s main menu systems first. Building these menus establishes the core data architecture for the rest of the game outside of the overworld itself.