💭 The idea

Hello everyone. I'm a senior programmer that FINALLY has some free time on his hands. I'm looking for my next personal project and would like to create a LARP management web application. I had posted a while back about this, but I've revisited some of the idea to make it more doable without destroying my work-life balance. Having said that, I know there's a lot of other great apps out there so I'm hoping I can do a pitch here and see if it's worth doing at all. Let me know what you think!

The project would be publicly available and free to use with self-hosting with well maintained documentation. The only costs who be related to the client's host of choice and various other subscriptions to enable emails, payments, etc. I would offer services to setup the whole thing for clients, but is it absolutely mandatory.

💻 The app

👤 Users

Users register themselves with their email. A user can have different roles (i.e. player, manager, admin, super admin) given to him by an admin that alters the information he can see and actions he can do (i.e. giving any character game objects directly).

🧙‍♂️ Characters

User can have many characters in their accounts. Characters don't hold much information on their own (i.e. name, age, background, gender, etc) and are mostly managed with game objects as you'll see below.

👪 Character groups

Users can manage groups that characters can subscribe to. The primary purpose of this is just for logistical information, but the usefulness may be expanded later (i.e. assigning game objects like territories to groups).

💲Payments and events

Events can be managed by admins and have products associated to them that users can pay through various systems (i.e. PayPal, Stripe).

⚙️ App configurations

Admins can configure the app through a user interface. Through this interface, they can edit options such as the default language, payment systems, email systems, maximum characters per user, if the LARP is public or private, mimum age for subscription and many more.

⚔️ Game objects

Game objects are the main appeal of the app. It's how admins document their game and how users assign items/statuses to their characters. You can see these organized like files and folders on a computer. For example:

• Classes
  • Warrior
  • Wizard
  • Rogue
• Items
  • Weapons
    • Sword
    • Staff
    • Bow
  • Materials
    • Ore
    • Herbs
    • Souls
• Religions
  • Old Gods
  • Dark Gods
  • Steven Seagal
• Lore
  • Year 1342 - Death of the king
  • Year 1342 - Civil war
  • Year 1343 - Rise of Bob

As you can see, some of these things are not like the others, but they are all game objects. Certain things like items can be obtained by characters, while others like lore cannot. To make game objects behave different for various purposes an admin can assign them properties such as:

• Can it be obtainable by a character?
• If it can be obtained, what is the maximum amount a character can possess?
• If it can be obtained, how many units does a character start with?
• If it can be obtained, what do I need to pay (in other game objects) to acquire it?
• If it can be obtained, what do I need as requirements (in other game objects) to acquire it?
• If it can be obtained, can I exchange it back (to obtain other game objects)?

With these options, you open up a multitude of options that can adapt to many different LARPs. Obviously, since they are extremely versatile it also means that they aren't as efficient than a custom built app, but hey, you can skip all that work! Here's a game object setup example of how one could manage classes for a character, given that admins can give class points to all registsered characters in an event.

• Classes
  • Class point (obtainable, max 1, start with 1)
  • Warrior level 1 (obtainable, max 1, costs 1 class point)
  • Warrior level 2 (obtainable, max 1, costs 1 class point, requires warrior level 1)

🤝 Trading (not in the first phase)

With this game object system, it would also be possible to develop a trading system outside of the game to keep the fun going. Obviously not all obtainable objects would automatically be tradeable between players. This wouldn't be implemented in the first phase, but definitely in the future.

🎉 Let me know your thoughts!

Would there be a demand for such an app, given that there are other free projects out there? Let me know what you think and if you have any ideas of what else could be a