Personal Projects
I have multiple public repositories on my GitHub profile, but there are some that I feel are worth calling out in particular.
PF2e Statblock for Obsidian
Dec 2023 - Present
PF2e Statblock for Obsidian is a plugin for Obsidian.md that parses and styles user-input Markdown into official-looking statblocks for items and rules elements for Pathfinder Second Edition.
I developed the plugin in response to a lack of offline utilities for formatting custom PF2e content. In addition to the final formatting, there is syntax highlighting to help content authors.
PF2e Statblock for Obsidian is written in TypeScript.
TimelineBuilder
Mar 2022 - Mar 2023, may resume later
TimelineBuilder is a shelved project to build a desktop program that allows worldbuilders to create and visualize timelines for their settings.
The reason I started making TimelineBuilder is that my wife, who GMs a Pathfinder2e game for me and some friends, was having trouble with the lack of timeline functionality found in many publicly available worldbuilding suites, such as WorldAnvil, particularly in regard to the fact that the “timelines” are presented more as glorified lists than actual timelines. After scouring the internet myself and finding nothing that quite achieved our vision, I resolved to rectify that gap in the market with a free, open-source, and customizeable app.
My vision for TimelineBuilder is for it to be a universal timeline tool, able to work with any calendar system provided to it (via script plug-ins), allowing worldbuilders to create robust timelines for their worlds and to see the events, periods, and eras of that timeline at-scale.
TimelineBuilder is being written primarily in C++, with scripts done in Python 3.
Ultra Spicy RPG Bot
Sept 2021 - Present
Originally forked from discord-audio-pipe, the Ultra Spicy RPG Bot is a Discord bot I made to assist in my friends’ Pathfinder experience. I originally created it in response to the shutting down of music-playing Discord bots (such as Rythm and Groovy) in early 2022.
Its main feature is serving as a pipe for audio from a PC to the Discord voice channel to which the bot is connected. This makes it a suitable method of providing background music to a Discord channel. I primarily use it in its VBAN mode, which uses VBAN audio streaming to transmit an audio feed from my personal PC to a server on which the bot is actually running. This allows the bot to have uptime independent of my own.
A secondary feature I grafted onto it is to handle a lot of the math inherent in making secret rolls against an entire party’s worth of characters (six, in our case). It takes in and stores party information, including various modifiers and feats, which is then compared against when making one of a handful of supported secret checks. I added this because my wife is not confident when it comes to math, and doing all that work in an amount of time to provide natural feedback is difficult for her.
Both features are largely controlled by text commands via Discord, allowing the bot to run and accept changes without someone (read: me) having to log into the server hosting it.
The Ultra Spicy RPG Bot is written in Python 3 to take advantage of Discord.py. The name comes from our larger group of friends who are all former Hi-Rez employees, from which we gathered our Pathfinder party: Ultra Spicy.
Pokémon Streaming Tools
Sept 2014 - Mar 2015
Back in college, I got really into Twitch Plays Pokémon, to the point where I decided that it would be fun to restream the feed of the Pokémon Stadium 2 matches and provide play-by-play commentary over them. Due to the amount of variables that can decide which player has the advantage for any given matchup, I decided to whip up StadiumStats in Python to provide the competitors’ stats and moves at-a-glance.
While on that streaming commentary kick, I was introduced to the concept of Nuzlocke runs by my then-girlfriend/now-wife. I decided I wanted to try streaming that, but I wanted to have an overlay to allow viewers to see at-a-glance what the state of my party was. In developing Pokevis, I switched over to using C++ with SMFL to build the display window that would serve as an overlay.
A few months later, TPP switched its inter-run game from Stadium 2 to Pokémon Battle Revolution, and, wanting to resume my commentary bit, I wrote RevolutionStats. With RevolutionStats, I took what I had learned from Pokevis to build a new stat display window.
I’ll be honest, the code I wrote for these three projects was pretty bad, and it turns out my performance as a streamer could charitably be described as mediocre. However, I believe these projects are worth including here because they were projects that I put enough into to make them useable, if only for myself.