A new project

Any time I sit down and attempt to write on a game project – old or new – I run into what I call an organizational dysfunction. Where to start? Where to put things? Dumping into Word/LibreOffice/KWord/Wordstar ( okay, maybe not Wordstar ) doesn’t hack it after a point. I do a lot of work long hand on a Remarkable tablet, but at some point, things need to move to file or become lost – particularly those piles of steno pads…

Writing does have a few domain-based helper applications designed to assist with constructing documents to an appropriate shape for the space. These are particularly strong for screenwriters and novelists. In my evaluations, these fall flat for Table Top RPG material. I’ve looked hard at Scrivener, Bibisco, manuskript, skribstro, Hemingway, a few neural-based projects, and others over the years and never found something that worked as well as the weird little Yeah Write! processor I used at one time.

It hit me while trying out an extension for VS Codium, that my brain was looking for something that worked more like code assembly and less like a document editor. With that thought, I remembered Homebrewery. Homebrewery is a nifty little tool that’s built to take Markdown documents and spit out PHB-styled PDFs. I like Markdown. I think it’s easier to use consistently and obviously than a lot of the pre-layout markup we used to do ( and I assume still do ) back when I wrote for pay and it’s nicer (if a little more limited) than old-school tools like TeX. Many tools can take it in and translate it well. It’s a nice editing middle ground. I’m also comfortable using VS Code/Codium as a general tool. Its built-in Markdown reviewers are handy and there are a boatload of extensions as well as documentation and examples for building your own.

So I’ve settled on this as a basic idea – build a VS Codium extension that:

• Assumes/creates a file folder structure that encapsulates a writing project via what VS Codium calls a workspace.
• Expects sections of writing material of arbitrary length and content to be placed in a specific location
• Assumes Markdown but has no requirement beyond being a basic text editor.
• Can interact with git extensions for revision control and potential offsite backup.
• Uses an assembly order to stitch together the sections in a defined order.
• Has a simple tree-based tool for building the assembly order
• Can preview the stitched results
• Can Export the stitched results

This feels like it solves most of my problems and excuses for getting a project off the ground while not making crazy requirements. Using Codium means access to a large platform of extensions. Many of these are programming-based, but there are a number of general writer-oriented things like spellcheckers, word counts, Grammarly, etc. It also gives me a fairly straightforward API for the additions I want to make without a lot of work. The main downside I’ve found so far is there doesn’t appear to be a good way to perform editor/writer change-tracking/redlining.

For the Bonus round, I’d really like:

• Has structures in the workspace for storing Homebrewery style Markdown conversion data
• Can Export a PDF based on the Homebrewery style

In my view, if you aren’t going to print, 95% of PDF layouts don’t need to do anything you can’t do with an HTML/CSS-based layout. Even in print, many products are well enough served by a simple but solid poured layout without tons of tweaking or radical styling. And it is an interesting challenge.