The two forces arrayed against one another. But, are they truly enemies?

Just Playin'

Hey WorldBuilders,

Playtesting is hard work. It's fun work, but it's hard. Repetitive. Analytical. Sterile.

That's right. It can be sterile when I'm just building charts and graphs to fine-tune some game math. It can be trying to roll 1000s of Legacy of the Cage 2 test actions. It's necessary, yes, but sometimes it is just a grind. No sugar coating it. I wouldn't trade it for the world!

But, I learned this little maxim on my very first big-boy professional job: work smarter, not harder.

My fellow seasoned web developer showed me how to automate data generation with some clever concatenation in Microsoft Excel. Instead of hours of copy/paste, I just dragged a single column and in 10 minutes I was off to lunch instead of bruising my fingertips doing redundant data entry.

Here I stand, nearly two decades removed, creating a simple but quick webapp to manage my LotC2 test data for both live dice rolling as well as fully simulated play. With the advent of powerhouse AI LLMs (thanks, Claude, old buddy), I've put this beast together in less than two days' time. Really, it was more like 3 hours' time spread over two days.

It handles fighter generation, promotion creation, team management, fight card setup (!!), and it also will calculate all the matchup targets and math for rolling actual analog mathches. I don't have to do any spreadsheeting, point-and-clicking, debugging, or any of that. Make a fighter, set up the fight, roll and resolve.

This takes my game design playtesting to the straosphere. In fact, I can see this would be useful for players as well. I'll consider the options there in the future post-launch. It's exciting!

To future worlds, Matt Ventre