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Hello Final Fantasy Hacktics!
I recently started a bubble.io web app that serves as a scoreboard for my roster of premade characters built for a PvP league. I am looking for feedback and suggestions, and maybe this can serve as inspiration to your own app ideas!
This is only a companion app; it doesn't actually play FFT, or mod it in any way. I am currently playing these characters on PSP against real-life, socially-distanced opponents when possible, or against myself.
You can check it out here: fftlive.bubbleapps.io And you can read on for more context.
Before quarantine I was working on a Live Tournament League, and designing some premade PvP characters for participants to use. The pandemic put the actual tournament on hold but I continued to playtest and refine the characters whenever I could get an opponent.
I was frustrated that I didn't have an easy way to track damage, healing, kills and deaths over the course of a match. I was relying on 'feels' if certain characters felt too weak or powerful.
My initial attempt at sharing my roster out to others began with a Trello board: https://trello.com/b/ABsGIVy5/fft-wotl-draft-board
This served as a decent springboard for tracking changes, but felt clunky to setup. It also didn't provide me with the hard data I needed to make informed changes to my characters.
After working with bubble.io (a no-code app builder) on other projects I felt confident I could at least make a scoreboard and load up a Tactics roster into a database. The only parameters I needed were portrait thumbnails, a name, and a youtube link to their character intro trailer (I am a video editor so I made videos for all the premades). This was all I needed for the ROSTER section of the app.
I feel a Draft is a necessity to keep players on their toes, and ensure the players know the entire roster and can adapt their play style when their favorite choices get banned. While not as intuitive and lacking the free-choice flow I come to expect from a game UI, it is a functional draft system with a linear progression. Thus the DRAFT section was born.
With Character selection in place it was a simple matter of displaying the players' choices on the scoreboard and adding any input fields to the Battle table for that particular match. Once the player exits the match, the Battle is deleted and the next match's stats are reset.
And here we are! On the roadmap for improvements:
- Simple scoreboard input method. Currently you must select each Character when inputting damage/healing/kills/deaths, meaning you must input damage given AND damage received. It would be better to select a Character, choose their Target, input damage/healing/death/kills once, and the scoreboard updates both Characters simultaneously.
- Map selection, filtered by size of match. Small maps are exclusively used for 3v3, large maps used for 5v5.
- A post-game battle report screen. Instead of immediately deleting a match I wish to create a match snapshot that can be exported for sharing, either as a .csv file or an image.
- Mobile responsiveness and general UI touchups
- Ability to add and share your roster via the app.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy previewing the app! I am excited to read your thoughts and answer any questions. Be well!
I recently started a bubble.io web app that serves as a scoreboard for my roster of premade characters built for a PvP league. I am looking for feedback and suggestions, and maybe this can serve as inspiration to your own app ideas!
This is only a companion app; it doesn't actually play FFT, or mod it in any way. I am currently playing these characters on PSP against real-life, socially-distanced opponents when possible, or against myself.
You can check it out here: fftlive.bubbleapps.io And you can read on for more context.
Before quarantine I was working on a Live Tournament League, and designing some premade PvP characters for participants to use. The pandemic put the actual tournament on hold but I continued to playtest and refine the characters whenever I could get an opponent.
I was frustrated that I didn't have an easy way to track damage, healing, kills and deaths over the course of a match. I was relying on 'feels' if certain characters felt too weak or powerful.
My initial attempt at sharing my roster out to others began with a Trello board: https://trello.com/b/ABsGIVy5/fft-wotl-draft-board
This served as a decent springboard for tracking changes, but felt clunky to setup. It also didn't provide me with the hard data I needed to make informed changes to my characters.
After working with bubble.io (a no-code app builder) on other projects I felt confident I could at least make a scoreboard and load up a Tactics roster into a database. The only parameters I needed were portrait thumbnails, a name, and a youtube link to their character intro trailer (I am a video editor so I made videos for all the premades). This was all I needed for the ROSTER section of the app.
I feel a Draft is a necessity to keep players on their toes, and ensure the players know the entire roster and can adapt their play style when their favorite choices get banned. While not as intuitive and lacking the free-choice flow I come to expect from a game UI, it is a functional draft system with a linear progression. Thus the DRAFT section was born.
With Character selection in place it was a simple matter of displaying the players' choices on the scoreboard and adding any input fields to the Battle table for that particular match. Once the player exits the match, the Battle is deleted and the next match's stats are reset.
And here we are! On the roadmap for improvements:
- Simple scoreboard input method. Currently you must select each Character when inputting damage/healing/kills/deaths, meaning you must input damage given AND damage received. It would be better to select a Character, choose their Target, input damage/healing/death/kills once, and the scoreboard updates both Characters simultaneously.
- Map selection, filtered by size of match. Small maps are exclusively used for 3v3, large maps used for 5v5.
- A post-game battle report screen. Instead of immediately deleting a match I wish to create a match snapshot that can be exported for sharing, either as a .csv file or an image.
- Mobile responsiveness and general UI touchups
- Ability to add and share your roster via the app.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy previewing the app! I am excited to read your thoughts and answer any questions. Be well!