Sam Wong

Chillin by Maciej Kuciara

 

My SP6 Project is a companion app for the classic tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. The app will be called ‘The Dungeoneer’. With my recent foray into the game I’ve quickly realised that it is a dense and hard-to-understand experience, even for someone like me who came in with a gaming background.

The aim of my project is to help beginners of the game break through the high barrier to entry and streamline the more monotonous parts of the game so they can get to the good parts: the role-playing, the improvisation, the ridiculous situations and just hanging out with friends.

The app will help players create their character which can be a lengthly process with many different options to choose from. It will also help manage information like inventory and equipment, character statistics, enemy encounters and story beats.

Keeping the traditional physical aspect of the game is also very important to me. Aspects like: scribbling notes, sketching out pictures of characters and locations of your game and rolling dice are some of the things that I think make D&D a unique experience, especially in this day and age of an abundance of digital games. To help keep that part of the game alive, the app will let players sketch out their characters on the iPad or let players take photos of doodles they have done on paper to use in the app.

Another form of visualisation of I want to use is Augmented Reality. I want to make a set of cards printed with a special pattern that the iPad can scan with it’s camera to generate an augmented version of various characters on the iPad to use in the game.

Dungeons & Dragons is a game to hang out with some friends and experience a world that we couldn’t normally experience. I want to help people break through the dense outer shell that D&D has so that they can experience the game.