Form and Function
The first time I saw a teaser for the .dungeon//remastered
project on Kickstarter, the inspired aesthetic took me immediately. I grew up in the 90s playing video games with my older brothers, and the artwork here hit a nostalgia nerve right away. When I received my digital backer copy of the game, I set aside my other projects to make a character creator that would strive to emulate the book’s presentation. Along the way, I added features to create an all-in-one reference site for the game.
The design and layout of the game rules lean heavily on 1990s gaming magazines, vintage OS interfaces, and GameFAQs video game guides. I designed the first iteration to match the GameFAQs printable ASCII document approach, but I quickly realized that would introduce headaches and reduce usability. As I always intended for this to be available for free public use, neither of those outcomes would be acceptable.
So I re-engineered my initial pages, adapting the brilliant work of Sakun Archarige, who, in 2022, began work on System.css , a Mac OS9-inspired CSS library (itself inspired by 98.css). I combined this library with my knowledge of Tailwind to rapidly prototype the reference pages before approaching my character creator from scratch again.
Tech
My previous (unreleased) character creation projects have been engineered from the ground up with React. I didn’t believe I would need that level of render control for this project, so I started with the simple Astro Minimal Theme. I went from conceptualizing to building my site in a few minutes and left the door open to expand the project with frameworks or libraries. I have not integrated React to this point, and I am unsure if I ever will. Astro’s template system and client-side JavaScript have served me well so far. I did add Tailwind as it is currently my preferred CSS framework for building layouts.
Bonus points: deploying Astro on Netlify is an absolute breeze. I’m pleased I went with Astro for this project, and I’ve already started two more using Astro (now that I think about it, you’re on one right now).
Response
"...it's so freaking cool. I love the character sheet and the random generators... I love the aesthetic too. this is the coolest thing anyones ever made for any of my games."
-- Snow, creator of .dungeon//remastered