The rewrite of the Assistant in Kotlin morphed into a sub-project: Squishy’s Tables.

https://tables.squishy.dev/

I noticed that a lot of the folks I play with have no interest in automating the game, or making it easier to calculate out target numbers. They really dig doing that themselves. But the one thing they all still use, despite decades of BattleTech experience is the good old table reference sheet.

And there’s never enough of them. So I wrote a digital version. Its very rough. Lots of enum-to-string as a display value, which isn’t great, but does function. I’ll improve the usability over time, but its already proved useful in at least one game day. No more guessing at what a 5 roll means on an LRM 10 rack. Just pull up the tables and look.

I have decided to rewrite the Assistant in Kotlin Multiplatform. Why? Flutter gave me great results, but I could never quite justify becoming a Dart expert just to write this one application. I’ve been using Kotlin more and more at work, and have a genuine affection for the language, and now it seems that KMP is mature enough that I can write some pretty functional web and android applications with it.

I’m hoping this doesn’t slow me down, but rather makes me go faster, since I’ll no longer become frustrated with Dart and the interesting ways that language works. I’m also going to start with a more streamlined, simple version of the application, so it’ll have a gentler learning curve and (hopefully) be more useful more quickly.

Stay tuned.

-Ben

I’ve decided that working on this thing without releasing it to the world is silly, and so I have finally gotten the courage (and momentum) to publish my Squishy’s Assistant application.

https://assistant.squishy.dev

What is Squishy’s Assistant?

This is my first attempt at making some kind of digital aid for BattleTech. The goal is to avoid spending so much time digging up tables, remembering what things to count, and spend more time rolling dice and having fun.