My buddy Peter Hentges sent me a link, last week or so, to Hitchcock, a newish iPhone app for composing film storyboards in the wild, using, among other elements, photos taken with your phone while you’re standing right there, wherever it is you want to eventually shoot your movie.
Obviously, this is fantastic. It’s just what none of us knew we wanted to do with our phones.
Moments like discovering Hitchcock almost always make me wonder what mobile helper apps for game-design creativity lie just outside my ability to articulate my needs. I’m not interested in more mobile games. I have those aplenty, thanks. I’m talking about creative tools, here. Maybe play-time helper apps. I’m skeptical about most of the “augmented tabletop” ideas I’ve heard, though. Most of those sound to me like standard-issue computer games, only worse.
Your ideas and prognostications, as always, are more than welcome. We provide the soapbox, you predict the future.
I want to know where the iPhone/iPod app for D&D is — the one that lets me arrange monsters and characters in initiative order, flip through them, mark powers used and recharged, etc. etc. This is an obvious tool, yet it doesn’t exist.
Not a game-changer, really, but there it is. A monster’s stat block seems perfectly suited to an iPhone/iPod Touch screen.
Not that I own either of those devices.