Over a year ago, I asked the internet how they organize their computers to run tabletop roleplaying games. As a game master, I found myself alt-tabbing a lot trying to find PDFs and browser windows and tabs I kept open and losing momentum in my games.The universal answer to my question was "get another monitor" which I didn't find acceptable.I was always a fan of apps like Figma and Miro where...
Started last year with a problem I faced personally playing TTRPGs with newcomers. Built Overseer over a year to where it is today.
Exactly one year ago today, I got fed up with tab juggling when running my D&D games and decided to build something to organize it all.VTTs were too cumbersome for me because it required a ton of prep upfront and I still needed to teach my players how to use the software. Tabletop games are most fun when the story flows without friction and so my goal was to make a program that made my life...
still, I think my other remark about his writings stand.
dddice[0] a multiplayer dice roller that allows your entire party to collect, customize, and roll 3D dice live using any of your favorite tabletop tools. We have integrations for: Roll20, Foundry VTT, Owlbear Rodeo, D&D Beyond, Stream Deck, OBS/Twitch, TaleSpire, Mobile/Desktop, and so much more.This means you can seamlessly collect and roll 3D dice across any of these tools. Roll from your...
Laravel, MySQL (Planetscale), Redis. Hosted on fly.io
Total monthly expenses is somewhere near $30/mo which is less than I've paid for personal hosting at times.
Have some ideas on monetization in the future but for now it's just fun
That's the reality of it. You don't need shiny frameworks or any of those tools to make money.
Are developers happy with it? Maybe! Nothing wrong with spicing up a site with a little jQuery. Heck, I used Alpine.js on a brand new site and it's great. No build step, just works!
Completely aside, but I used to write PHP 10-ish years ago during the PHP 3/4/5 era. My career launched me into Node.js and JavaScript but I've since come back to PHP and it's been really lovely to write and maintain.
Co-founder of dddice here. Feel free to ask any questions about our infrastructure, codebase, or my latest D&D characters!
"Use boring technology" - Laravel, MySQL, Fly.io for hosting
We automate nearly all aspects of the business as well. If a task needs to be done more than once, it's worth automating. GitHub actions to test/deploy, admin pages for all activities such as marketplace submissions, payouts, tax reports, chargebacks/refunds ... If there is ever a problem with a purchase, we have ways to reply and refund all with the click of a button.
We recently switched from a VPS to Fly.io and PlanetScale as well and it's been working quite nicely. As we grow to more regions, it's nice to know we can deploy servers close to our users with a single command.
There are many ways to form productive habits at home; for example, remote conference rooms that people can jump in and out of. Slack even has "huddles" now which are very useful for remote work.
Letting your team down has nothing to do with being a seat-warmer in the office.
Anyone writing comments about "scaling" or "performance" has never had to deal with a half-baked application written by some junior node.js developer who thought their microservice had to be Internet Scale(tm)
PHP is a great choice in 2022. Hell, it'll be a great choice in 2032 I'm sure. The tooling and debugging that PHP provides is incredibly powerful. Developers are easy to find, it's easy to pick up (which sure makes it easy to get wrong), but those who get it right will do it incredibly well.
Arguments against PHP are lead by developers who think they're smarter than they really are.
There's a couple themes to choose from right now but we have an editor in the works that should allow anyone to create their own dice themes.
Happy to answer any questions about the tech or site!