About

Hello! My name's Kendall. In 2012 I discovered the "program" called Choicescript, mainly used for dating sim-esque games made by the Choice of Games company. However, they provided the documentation and files required to make your own games in the language. I dabbled some in game-making (the games are mostly text-based, and I'm a writer first and foremost).

Then, however, I got into Dungeons & Dragons--or more specifically, Pathfinder. I played a few small, short sessions of campaigns with a friend as my DM, but I knew that being a player wasn't for me. Instead, I started a campaign with three of my friends, using Skype and then Discord as our playground (since at the time, we had to run sessions long-distance.) This session, due to time zones and schedule conflicts and just the fact we were all newbs, eventually dwindled out until it became forgotten.

At this point, I decided I wanted to create my own system; while I appreciated Pathfinder, there was an awful lot of rules that I ended up discarding. And not just that, I loved world-building. Creating new species, new cultures, new languages and biologies and religions, that is my passion as a writer. I'm often told that my habit of being a perfectionist and gnit-picking details has been displayed at its best when creating worlds.

And so I did. I created my first homebrew, which has always just been referred to as, well, Homebrew. I created two twin galaxies, filled them with planets and species and cultures, and then created rules for how the game could be played within its bounds. The homebrew campaign has now been running for nearly a year, with one major plotline already completed and another beginning to unfold.

In the process of running Homebrew, however, I began to run into circumstances that would momentarily halt my DMing process. They weren't fullblown problems, but they were, well, delays. I would need a new name for an NPC, or I would have to manually write down the initiative order and everyone's HPs and ACs during battle. I would have to pause each time damage was dealt just to mentally calculate how much 18 damage would take from 41 HP. Because of this, I turned to my Choicescript roots. I had used random generation for some of my game attempts before, and I considered the question: could I use Choicescript for something other than gamemaking?

And sure enough, I could. I spent one month exploring all my options; I made quizes, I made generators, I made translators. I made self-contained scripts that took only an hour at most to make, which could be looped infinitely as often as I needed. Now, coming up with an NPC for one of my aliens took only the click of a link. I learned to combine letter sounds in my generators to create names for unique languages, fitted together in a way that fit the general feeling of my species.

Soon after, I created a sheet creator, for a new homebrew I was cooking up: ATLABrew, a game system designed for the world of Avatar: the Last Airbender. With the creator, I could take the code generated by my players, and create for them their sheet managers, self-contained programs which would allow them to keep track of HP, refer to their skills and powers, and keep notes for themselves. While the manager still has to be updated after each session, it was a huge personal sucess, one that I took pride in.

Now, I have an assortment of tools for the use of DMs, as well as information and documentation for the brews I've created. I can only hope that they'll be as useful to others as they have been for me.