I am a huge advocate of side projects, small apps that let you test an idea in isolation usually for your own personal use.
TABLETOP SIMULATOR MAGIC THE GATHERING SOFTWARE
Over the course of my 14 year career as a software developer I’ve always tried to encourage new developers to work on side projects as a way of honing their craft. There are three reasons for this: firstly, building something for yourself is far more rewarding than building something for a client secondly, it gives you an excuse to try out new technologies or methodologies that can then improve future client work without running the risk of derailing a major project 1 and thirdly, it’s a great way of building up a portfolio if you’re starting out. I’ve always built bizarre little side projects and apps ranging from an iPad app to manage my wine collection to various PHP scripts that extract my time playing video games on Steam.
TABLETOP SIMULATOR MAGIC THE GATHERING FULL
Sometimes these side projects turn into full apps such as Music Library Tracker and Pocket Rocket but usually they are highly bespoke utilities for me that nobody else gets to see. This year I’ve decided to start a new series of articles where I’ll show a side project I’ve built over the past month. Today’s article is all about “Sealed”, an iPad app I build in January 2020 to simulate the opening of Magic the Gathering booster packs. I’m assuming that most people reading this article have little to no interest in Magic The Gathering and so I’m not going to explain that side of it in much detail. Suffice to say that the game consists of you opening blind packs containing 15 cards that you can play with. In sealed play, you open 6 of these blind packs (named “boosters”) and then build a 40 card deck out of the cards you opened. We can then export them to the game Tabletop Simulator so we can play with them in a realistic 3D physics-based environment… The idea for this app is that it will simulate this process allowing me and my good friend John (who lives in Sweden) to open 6 packs each and build a deck with the random contents within. Tabletop Simulator even supports VR so we can simulate playing a few rounds in the same room even though we’re around 870 miles apart.Īs with all of the side projects I’m going to be working on I’m not focused on perfect code or UI it just needs to work. That said, I did spend a bit more time prettying this one up as I wasn’t the sole user.
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