Build Blog.
Weekly first-person posts on what I'm shipping, what broke, and what I'm thinking about. Written by Jean.
Action bars, story cards, and the engine underneath them
The live session moved to PixiJS, the action bar got a real surface, and the story card stayed as the DM's narrative tool.
Building the VTT in-house, not exporting to one
Most platforms hand off maps to someone else's VTT. This is about closing the loop and testing what you built without leaving the tool.
Building the export canvas from scratch with Konva
Outsourcing a canvas sounded like a shortcut. The vendor pricing turned it into a tax. Building it with Konva was cheaper and better.
The infrastructure month
Some months are about features. This one was about everything underneath them: cleaning up, tightening boundaries, and observability.
Shipping a platform solo, or what a year of moving deadlines looks like
A year in. The deadlines keep moving, the feature ideas keep multiplying, and I know more about the 5e SRD than any person should.
Meeting users where they already are, starting with Discord
D&D players already live in Discord. The bot exists so the product can listen to them before the community gets large enough.
Campaigns and live sessions, or making D&D online actually work
Running D&D online means juggling five tabs. The campaign manager and live session view are the start of putting all of that in one place.
The June sprint, or what coming back looks like
Coming back from a long break, the right first move wasn't a new feature. It was the cleanup that had been bothering me before I left.
What I learned building alone for four months
The work paused, the project never died, and Sisyphus kept it alive in my head. What solo building taught me about breaks.
Monsters and NPCs in a weekend: reusing the generation pipeline
Characters were one creature. Monsters and NPCs were the other two. The pipeline composed: the only kind of reuse that pays.
D&D pivots everything: characters, the 5e API, and the first generation
The voxel work ran out of pull. The D&D pivot happened because the energy was there and the infrastructure already pointed in that direction.
Voxel editing, layers, and the joy of spatial UX
Picking voxels as the editing primitive, building a layers panel that didn't lie, and the UX fixes that made a 3D scene feel like a tool.
The first commit: from zero to a 3D canvas
How D3Designs started: a friend's loaded question, the stack I already knew, and the shape of a 3D canvas before it was a D&D tool.