Alexa the Barbarian

Generated PDF
GUI Interface

Inspiration

Eilidh and I are both placement students at a science lab in Oxfordshire. I study engineering and she does computer science. Since meeting we've been playing a lot of Dungeons and Dragons together (alongside another team at this hack) and we wanted to create a tool that helps new players learn the ropes.

D&D is not the simplest of games to set up and the time it takes can be offputting. Our tool streamlines the character creation process, which can take up to half an hour, so play can begin as soon as possible.

What it does

We've created a generator that pulls D&D data from http://www.dnd5eapi.co, creates a character object, and prints the data to a PDF file ready for viewing and.

How we built it

We created the back end in Python, first of all creating a character class to hold the extensive lists of data a character contains. We did API calls to populate fields with data such as race and class. Many fields we calculated ourselves, such as random numbers for stats, randomly generating a name, etc. We created a GUI interface in Tkinter to launch the creation script.

Challenges we ran into

The data available was far more extensive than we imagined - D&D is a BIG game. It took a while to work out how to navigate to the data we actually needed. We had planned to make the script powered by Alexa, or to create an API encyclopedia of data for Alexa to be queried on (e.g, "Alexa, spout lore about goblins!"). Unfortunately we ran out of time before creating a working prototype as we decided to work on creating a more polished PDF file

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Lea: This is my first Hackathon so everything was pretty new. I had limited knowledge of object-oriented programming before starting this weekend, so we did a lot of paired programming to create the character Class. I didn't know what an API was before this weekend and had never used Git!

Eilidh: My D&D knowledge has skyrocketed and Tuesday's game is gonna rock. I also learned the basics of tkinter, and sincerely hope I never work with it ever again. I learned the foundations of creating Alexa skills, which I'd like to continue working on for this project. Mainly so the project is accurately titled...

What we learned

Lea: OOP, loads of Python, APIs, tkinter, D&D lore, Git

Eilidh: Alexa skills creation, tkinter, D&D lore

What's next for AlexaTheBarbarian

We'd like to flesh out the final corners of the character sheets (we didn't get onto spells) and implement the Alexa knowledge encyclopedia for in-game queries.