Tom Chapman

Precipice of Destiny

It's been 330 versions since we last spoke (since I posted a blog). I would argue that I was letting my work speak for itself–and it does so eloquently–but it was actually just a matter of executive dysfunction.

So, let's touch on some highlights from the past few months...

General UI improvements

Braytech is praised for being a unified, polished, app-like experience, which exemplifies the game's own UI language. I've made additions and modifications to ...

Subscriptions

This post is just for Patreon!

Recall this old post. I recently spent some time fleshing out Braytech's Subscriptions view (seen above).

I wanted to properly exemplify the perks of supporting Braytech in a way more native to Braytech itself.

Patreon supporters are granted the very same perks, hence why I'm posting thi...

Origins

All good things start somewhere. So much of what I know, I owe to Destiny's API. It allowed me to escape when I needed it, to create and learn new things, and it rewarded my persistence. Look, the API isn't dead–I'm just saying it's great and that we're lucky to have it and that it has afforded me many opportunities. Everyone should learn to code.

Now, let's take a browse down memory lane. Sadly, I failed to reliably document the many incarnations of my work. This is most of what I co...

Finesse

Spit and Polish

Braytech is known for its attention to detail through its interface and expression of function. This month, I was able to get the "Mac Catalyst" version of the app running, enabling the iOS app to act as a desktop app for Mac users.

Websites have come a long way. They can enable indistinguishable experiences. Braytech runs the same code everywhere, albeit aided by native APIs in specific contexts such as iOS and Android for widgets and push notifications.

A...

Manifesting Rewards and Fashion

I forgot how to write blog posts. Actually, I was just going through a whole thing. I'm still going through a whole thing, but I've found the power to write, and that's good because I have a lot to show off.

Let's get started.

Manifest

First and foremost, this is a developer feature. Destiny's API comes in two parts: the API proper and the manifest and its definitions therein. The definitions define individual entities such as items and triumphs, providing localised names,...

Green Witch

I have a real clunker of a thought that I often struggle to express with finesse. Braytech used to be 3 pages–checklists and some triumph titles. It was easy for me to envision, in my mind, its value and the effort I had so far invested into it. I'm a "do everything in my head" kind of guy (as opposed to writing things down and using other physical aids) and I often run into a metaphorical RAM limit. This has led to the use of paper and pencil for understanding Braytech, especially when bui...

Revenant

Lost Sector Rewards

With the arrival of The Final Shape, lost sector rewards changed. No longer do lost sector award engrams which decrypt to specific armour pieces. Instead, they award exotic engrams which can be focus by Master Rahool to acquire specific items.
As such, the various displays of lost sectors and rotations throughout Braytech have been updated to reflect this non-specificity. This includes [Push Notifications](/settings/push-notifications) options (the option to rec...

Untitled

Hi friends!

Long time no chat... Let's get into it. So, I've realised retroactively that I've had some bad burnout (and a healthy dose of depression) from my insistence of delivering at least 2 major Braytech features a month.

I've been informed that's unsustainable and that I should lower my expectations of myself. However, as I've mentioned previously, I worry that I don't offer a great enough value proposition for my subscribers.

Offering a great enough value proposition ...

Get Equipped

It's ya boy, Dare, aka Tommy Chappo heeeeree, back-at-it-again-with-another-post-about-a-Braytech-featurreeeeeeee

Fireteam Equipment

For your convenience, you may now view your fireteam's equipment. This includes each player's unique rolls, highlighting breaker types (anti-champion perks) active on their equipped weapons.

An overview of my experience building this feature:

• Braytech is character centric. Everything is centred around a specific player's select...

  2024-07-18 00:13:40 +0000 UTC View Post

Coordinated Geography

Hello. I'm Tom Chapman, and you may remember me from previous blog posts, or that time I was repeatedly referred to by my full name on Twitter over some debacle with icons from and based on Bungie's Destiny video game.

Maps

You may have read previously that I had been waiting for something to happen before I could start updating Braytech's Maps with new content. That something has happened, and Maps have now been updated with new content. Huzzah!

It was a furious week, esp...

The Final Shape

Important Patreon notice

I want to remind everyone that I've been focusing my efforts on minimising waste. One of the methods I've been employing is by offering an integrated alternative to Patreon. You can read more about it in the post I made 6 months ago.

It's of paramount importance to me that I ensure no one who gives me their hard-earned dollars feels disappointed or regretful ...

Bounty Hunters

It was time to pay the Quests view some attention. I wanted to update and add new features for bounty collectors. Naturally, I ended up rewriting, restructuring the entire Quests view first. Makes sense, I guess. It felt good to clean that mess up. Once I'd finished with that, I sought feedback to complement my own ideas on how to improve bounty-related features.

Previous

The original bounties view is a flat, uninspired table view...

2024-05-20 06:57:10 +0000 UTC View Post

Custom Usernames

Custom usernames! I've wanted to add custom usernames for a time but there's a lot of moving parts that I needed to have full into place first.

Braytech is made up of many parts:

• An NGINX server answers requests for static files like HTML, CSS, and JavaScripts

  • This is the primary entry point for Braytech's visitors

• Node.js Express server 1 answers requests for custom API requests

  • This handles all sorts of things such as ...

    2024-05-02 05:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post

I Tried Using Ads

This week in Braytech, we'll touch on what's been happening with Braytech and its developer for the past few weeks:

• report on AdSense test

• bills and money

• depression and executive dysfunction

• new features

AdSense test

A situation so dire, I gave in to trying ads. Here are some points summarising what I've learnt from this sucky experience:

• 75% of Braytech users employ some sort of ad blocking

  2024-04-04 04:46:17 +0000 UTC View Post

March in a Nut Shell

• Collectible item design
• Improved support for medium-size display users
• Improved core components for Collections and Triumphs to enable more features and a better user experience
• Improved item details dialog for display of items with old screenshots
• Improved triumph details dialog
• Added more curated collections to Collections
• Added all missing season data for emblems to Collections
• Added damage type and tooltips to Patterns &...
  2024-03-18 09:56:48 +0000 UTC View Post

I'll Never Use Ads

This month, I’m trying something I said I never would. 

Braytech is lucky to have millions of users but less than 0.01% support its development through subscriptions or donations. 

It’s been more than 5 years without a page ads but with the cyclical decline in interest, I’m under more financial pressure than ever. This pressure needs to be offset in one way or another and one of the ways I’ve chosen to employ is an ads test. 

This mont...

ICYMI Polls

Reminder that polls moved away from Patreon to Discord and it's turned out to be very effective and productive! If you haven't seen them, consider checking out the Discord server!

Sets

This new feature allows you to quickly see all of the items you can obtain from specific activities in one convenient place. Each activity is divided up by encounter for your viewing pleasure and includes references to related items such as patterns and the activity's featured exotic weapon.

This is an excellent starting point for sharing data between features, enabling intuitive highlighting of encounter-specifi...

Be Mine

SITREP I fractured at least one of my ribs cleaning a car bonnet. This incident, occurring late last week, has delayed my rise to greatness ever so slightly. Out of naivety and over confidence, I threw my body to try to reach, and on the third attempt I heard some interesting sounds, and then I briefly lost the ability to breathe.

Despite this debuff, I've been making some improvements around here. Not unlike many of Braytech's users, I've been engaging in some completionist activity in...

Voluspa

These past days, I've been making a lot of improvements to Voluspa, Braytech's server side counterpart.

• Addressed technical debt in a responsible manner
• Secured user endpoints
   - Privacy was built in from the start but data could be overwritten if a user had been socially-engineered aka this was a non-issue but I've closed it anyway
• Increased Discord abilities
   - New slash and app commands for me to do things like manage polls
• Br...
  2024-02-08 03:19:56 +0000 UTC View Post

Blogging

With subscribers in mind, I've been working on improving specific features to maintain accountability and trust.

I've been spending a lot of time improving how the Discord server functions both for me and for users, but not everyone uses Discord.

For everyone else, there's the 2024-02-07 22:03:55 +0000 UTC View Post

Loadouts!

This week, I worked on adding loadouts to Braytech. At long last!

I wanted to make sure I got it right, so it took me a minute/a few months.

Working with items and the Destiny API is like trying to massage playdough into something beautiful (but still inedible). 

This is the basic implementation which covers all of the bases–I have plans to extend it. I still want to add more intuitive features to the Character view as well, but this all takes a long time to build. De...

Tech Debt? Nah

Just a note of admiration for myself. 😎

I took the plunge and gave Microsoft 5 bucks so I could see my Git commit history for Braytech.

I've drawn the following conclusions:

• Something cataclysmic occurred in September 2020 never to be explained further
• My most consistent year for improving Braytech is 2023
• My most productive year for improving Braytech is 2023

2024-01-04 08:06:27 +0000 UTC View Post

Details

The Inspect view. It's been with us for years now, through various incarnations. Rest in ham and pineapple pizza.

Say hello to the all-new Details view, pictured here alongside the Details dialog from the 2023-12-29 03:54:48 +0000 UTC View Post

Hive Anatomy and T-Shirts

Have you ever stopped to think about Hive anatomy? Their experience of the world must differ greatly from our own... Is their flesh and bone anything like ours... Are they carbon-based... So many questions...

With that thought shared, I write to inform you of a great success: I have personally verified the quality and satisfaction components of Braytech's merch, specifically, t-shirts (as pictured).

It's taken...

Discord Roles

If you're a Discord user and you're missing the role for your tier, you can use the new command /register_discord_with_voluspa 👀

I've just mirrored the blog posts to the Braytech homepage and I want to get both blog posts and the app change log inside the Discord server but that's going to take me a few minutes to work out

Situational Report

Sah dude

I've been a busy bumble bee 🐝

Subscriptions

The new Subscriptions page is now fully operational. You can read more about it here. That said, I'm continuing to work on and improve it.

Theming

In a surprising move, I overhauled how colours are composed in order to support better t...

Small win on a hot day

Just eradicated my bug backlog. That's all. Just wanted to brag about it. 🦗🫡

Eliminating Waste

Hi!

Somewhat important post for all of my patrons today... Patreon take 8% of my earnings, of your money, and they can't keep getting away with this!

As I'm a budding web developer with a can-do attitude, I've decided to invest some time into integrating a payment handler, Stripe, directly into the app.

It's a frustratingly large task but it will literally save money from being wasted over time, and as I always say, every dollar helps.

Benefits:

• Tighter int...
  2023-12-12 18:54:13 +0000 UTC View Post

Lore overlay and emblem support added to item dialog

Hello

• I've added the lore overlay feature to item dialogs and it looks and works just like it does in-game.
• I've also added emblem support
• I intend to somewhat replace the collections item view with the character item dialog. As in, when you go to collections and select an item, the whole page changes - I'm going to move away from that soon in favour of this.
• I'm almost ready to add helpful compare functionality back in.
• I increasingly want to b...
  2023-12-09 10:47:48 +0000 UTC View Post