After an extended absence (due to a combination of few ideas of things to write for them, shortages of time, and platform-specific challenges), I'm back into the DIC52 with an entry for the HTML5 challenge, Traspel Lite. This is a simple one-page spellcasting game, pitting the player against a series of foes of increasing difficulty.

For this week, I've written up an Ars Magica die roller. Ars Magica's dice conventions are unique, using three different types of rolls, all of which are based on ten-sided dice:

• Simple Roll: This is just your basic d10 roll with 0 read as 10.
• Quality Roll: In a quality roll, 2-10 are read normally, but a roll of 1 means to re-roll, doubling the result. Further rolls of 1 will repeatedly double the final result, allowing for arbitrarily high rolls. For example, rolling 1-1-1-7 is read as 56 (7, doubled three times).
• Stress Roll: Stress rolls are basically like quality rolls, but with the potential for very bad results as well as very good. A stress die is rolled just like a quality die, except that, if the initial roll is a 0, the total of the roll is 0, regardless of any modifiers, and the die is rerolled to determine whether you have botched your attempted action. Under poor circumstances, additional botch dice may be called for. If any botch die comes up 0, something bad has happened in addition to having failed. If multiple botch dice are rolled and more than one 0 is rolled, each 0 makes the result even worse.

This week is something of a gimme for me, given that I've already done app development against the Twitter API. For the sake of something simple and accessible, I opted to revise my earlier Iron Man post on Monitoring Hashtags with Perl and Net::Twitter to make use of Twitter::TagGrep and call that my DIC 52 Weeks of Code entry for this week:

I've been following the site </dream.in.code> for a good while now, mostly helping people out with their Perl problems. Today, I found an announcement that they're doing a "52 Weeks Of Code" Challenge, which started yesterday. It looks interesting (especially since they've suggested one week's challenge will be in Brainfuck), so I'll be participating and posting my solutions here.

The first challenge is in jQuery and looks pretty simple, but I have other code that I'm pushing to get done today, so it can wait until (hopefully) tomorrow.