Experience is a wonderful thing

When designing and developing NPC Designer I decided not to do certain things, a good example of this would be the ability to save and reload a npc to be motified at a later date.  I had many reasons for this and at the time all sounded very solid and reasonable but the truth is looking back, I was crazy.  So the first thing we learn is not rely on other developers or applications to cover something when you can do it yourself.  Users want easy one stop applications to handle their needs.

The Next issue came up when I decided to play around and create Item Designer, I always wondered what it would be like to easily create weapons and armor having something else handle all the details for me and the end result being a nice clean stat block.  These applications need to be able to communicate with other applications so the user ends up not just with a character or NPC but also with the supporting details and in a professional format.

About three years into developing NPC Designer I started designing a new application on paper, I call it Evolution.  I call it that because I feel that anyone who completes a d20 application in it's full life cycle will learn some critical things along the way and like anything it will evolve.

The next blog will go into what key elements Evolution has...