Character token made by: t8y
As the first actual blog for the project, I wanted to give some insight on why I took 10 hours to achieve a simple teleport function and expand on ‘why’ of the project.
Features
- Select two Items in the scene to ‘link’ them, creating a wormhole.
- Drag an Item to a wormhole and it will be teleported to the other side of it.
The 10 hours
Unknown to me, Owlbear SDK hasn’t been updated in more than a year. Not only, but the tools provided by it are far from extensive. In other words - they don’t really give proper tools to create a teleporting functionality and the documentation for the SDK… barely holds itself together. It’s pretty much “here, take those functions!” and you figure the rest yourself.
So yeah, the 10 hours spent where trying to figure workarounds the limitations of the SDK and fixing unexpected bugs. It also was a huge test of my typescript knowledge, as I had to back track a lot on the progress of implementation because of typescript screaming that I was typing things wrongly…
Why all this trouble if out there is the Portals Extension?
Well, the GM of the table I’m currently playing stated to me how Portal was ‘buggy’, not working as intended. As I had no idea for a project for this event, I suggested I could give it a try on remaking it.
Ironically or not, in those 10 hours I happened to understand why the errors she spoke about are happening on the Portal Extension, as they also are happening on mine. It goes back to what tools the SDK provides and their respective limitations.
Next updates
I plan to add visual cues about what Items are linked to what and other visual feedbacks so the experience of creating wormholes is overall better and intuitive, as well the option to create one-way wormholes. All in all, the next devlog may be the last for this project.
Bye bye!
