Terre Natale Calculator
This project is a character sheet manager for the homebrew role playing game system Terre natale, which have quite complex character creation rules.
Design Principle
The calculator was build witht the following in mind:
- Backward Compatibility: All chracter sheet can be loaded in any later version, even though the save format evolved.
- Ease of update: since the rules eveolve sometimes on a weekly basis, changing the formulas used should not be too complex
- ease of use: creating a new character should not take more than a few minutes. While knowledge of the game system is required, the calculator should not require special training to use
History
When the Terre Natale system was introduced to me, the first thing that struck me was the complexity of the skills assignment rules. Each skill can have experience assigned to it, and the sum of assigned experience is used to compute the stats. However, each skill's experience can influence multiple stats, which ends up being a nightmare to keep track of.
So, just after our first game, my SO and myself started working on the project, in order to simplify stats calculation. We did a quick job in Windows Forms, without saves or special characters attributes like race or class.
Over the following months, the calculator expanded and changed with the game system, introducting a save system, customisation of attributes, class bonus calculation, an installer... We even ported the system over to WPF, separating it into two projects, the Core calculation based on the Winform version, and the presentation layer.
In the end, this ended up being an important lesson on software design, project management and workload sharing. Now that the Terre Natale system is undergoing a complete rework, the project is not updated anymore but, depending on our GM, it may see a revival someday.
Download and screenshots
All the code and releases are available on Github