Context
KDDL Project is broadly speaking an assistant for players of Knights and Dragons, a multiplayer role game for smartphones where each user leads a team of heros in PvP and PvM battles. The key to success in this game is to equip the heros with the most powerful armors. Knights and Dragons provides a guild system that allows players to team up to compete in regular events.
Problematic
Knights and Dragons by its own doesn't provide the necessary features for comfortable and effective coordination between members of the guild. One of the main gaps is not able to inspect the armors owned by allies. Therefore it's common the use of outside applications, like Line, to communicate; however there is a need of more targeted application.
Definition
KDDL is a web app that comes with two basic goals; make an armors database, and allow the user to manage their inventory. On this basis, it is possible to define a wide range of benefits that KDDL can incorporate to improve the gameplay and user interaction inside the guild. The initial scope of the project has been split into two phases. This article describes the features implemented in phase 1.
Design is full responsive, so the users can properly access the system with any device, either desktop or mobile. Screens correspond to the guild view, where we can find a detailed table of members
From left to right: login screen, side menu and user profile. The side menu can be deployed swiping the screen or toggling the top left button.
Left screen corresponds to the table of known armors. Some filters like name, rarity and elements are provided. Right screen shows the view of a specific armor.
Users can set their name and e-mail, country and timezone, manage one or several players (K&D accounts), upload own avatar and change password
Screen to create or edit a player bound to a user. Players have a name, level, guild they belong, optional description, tags and can be mark as main or secondary user account.
Users can find and set all armors their players own. Right screen shows the dialog to add a new armor to the inventory. Left screen shows the inventory content. Users can see the inventory of guild mates besides their own. Power measure is a new variable introduced by KDDL to comprehensively assess the solvency of the player based on the quality and the variety of his armors.
All knowledge about armors come from the K&D Wikia website. There is no API or any other data service to retrieve data, so KDDL crawls, downloads and analyzes every found armor page in Wikia and stores generated data into the database. Knights and Dragons is continually releasing new armors, for this reason KDDL provides an user interface (Left screen) to trigger this crawling process in a friendly way. Right screen shows a view to find and manage existing KDDL accounts. It can be filtered by nickname and system role and displays who is online. Both screens are administrator features.
This project was an original idea of mine, and its design and implementation have been made entirely by me. The main purpose was to learn new technologies and of course the satisfaction of developing a tool that can be useful for a group of people.
At the present the system is deployed and working for a group of 40 users, among whom I include myself. All screenshots presented belong to real interfaces and real data of the system, having changed only the user avatars for privacy reasons.
KDDL has been successfully tested in Mac OS, Ubuntu and Windows, iOS and Android devices. Tested browsers were Safari, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
Resources employed
Database MongoDB (NoSQL JSON)
jQuery and Bootstrap3 for client
Eclipse IDE for developing
Acknowledgments
Thomas Park for the Lumen Bootstrap theme: http://bootswatch.com/lumen/
Alia Technologies for support this personal project with free and high quality NodeJS hosting
Mates of guild Dragonlance for testing and suggest improvements
