Sad news: due to forces outside of our control, the Catalyst Player App will soon be delisted from the Google Play Store. If you have the app today, I’m not sure if you can continue to use the version downloaded from the Play Store. There is no online component, so unless there’s a secret Android check to associate the publisher account, the app should function perfectly well offline. You can find the .apk files on the Catalyst page and download them independently of the tech giant’s storefront.
Reflecting back on the app development experience, it’s definitely something that our fledgling company learned from and influenced our contemporary decisions to shy away from apps. The rest of this blog is a retrospective on the experience, so if you’re not in the game business, you’ve passed the informational part and can continue at your own risk of secondhand self-indulgence.
Catalyst has a lot going on. I don’t think it demands more than other, comparable RPGs, but if you’re not used to these sorts of long-form RPGs, it can be daunting to manage a character sheet. Many of our original testers (which is a formal way to say “my friends and their friends”) had never played something from this genre or had only played D&D (a system with an incredible amount of infrastructure). Given my background in software engineering, I was quick to suggest an app version of the character sheet to help players. Unsurprisingly, my testing circle was also in the tech world and jumped at the idea. The bias is obvious now, but 23-year-old me didn’t have the best perception of the world.
Three apps were conceived: a player app to manage character sheets and battle stat management, a GM app to manage NPCs during combat, and a battle app to manage character position. The battle app was never developed, which is probably for the best considering this is the service Roll20 provides. The other apps solve specific problems and help players manage combat. Herein lies the problem.
Having the apps in the wings, whether they were conceptual or actual at the time, affected the base game. I think some of the maintenance might have been toned down without the promise of a tool. Additionally, every ability or spell that had an exception to a rule meant writing a special case in the app. I don’t have a direct example of this influence, but the subconscious impact was present. I don’t think there’s such a thing as a purely supplemental tool. Everything in the game’s ecosystem influences the design. This isn’t a bad thing: the space available on a character sheet is a design decision that affects character complexity. We’d consider that to be a good influence to tamp down on overly detailed characters. In our case, the central premise of “players can use paper character sheets or the app” was always going to be hard to land. The app is so much better at enforcing rules. However, in a game genre about exploring the boundaries of mechanics and crafting a unique story, maybe strict adherence to the rules isn’t the best thing.
All of this is the cerebral side of a companion app. In practice, the biggest challenges were with the actual development. I prototyped our apps for Windows Phone because it was the programming framework with which I was most familiar. Obviously, that ended up being something that never reached players. We switched to Android and got something that worked well for the player app. The GM app was a little rough around the edges, but still serviceable and helpful. We never managed to port the apps to iOS. At the time Apple’s development ecosystem required Apple hardware and licensed software and being a line cook didn’t afford me the necessary funds. Some friends attempted to help out, but the subtleties of Catalyst’s rules made it hard to disconnect me from the process. I feel bad we never published an iOS version, but going further meant succumbing to the sunk cost fallacy. I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who contributed in some capacity and wish we could have had more to show for their hard work.
Keeping the apps in the store today would require reinvesting in them. The executive summary is that the Android version we targeted is far beyond the support window. Despite not having any API calls that should be decommissioned (such as for security reasons), what we rely on is getting removed. The software we used to develop the app (Eclipse and Ganymede) is no longer supported (Android requires the Google tech stack, which sucks to see them follow Apple’s greedy example). I tried porting things, but it wasn’t happening without substantial effort. Realistically, the return on investment wouldn’t be there.
I hate that money complicates things, but the reality is that apps are expensive. Software engineers command a high price. Publishing an app costs money. Updating apps for compliance takes time. There are tools and frameworks we could leverage today to simplify some of these challenges, but it’s still a different workstream than making a tabletop game. Given the rising costs of freight, production, and basically everything else, it’s hard to justify adding another cost to making a tabletop game. It’ll take a lot for Cherry Picked Games to go down that road again.
To be clear, apps have benefits and we’d keep them in the app store if we could. But given that we’re complicating the acquisition experience (downloading and installing an “unsafe” .apk file isn’t an experience most folks want to do), I’d prefer to embrace the present and wax poetic about the paper character sheets.
I still play Catalyst when I can get a group together. I never use the apps, but I do tell my party about them. Maybe I shy away from the technology for the same reason I still say the term “pen-and-paper RPG”: the experience is meant to be fundamentally different from a video game. The imperfections make it better. Discovering, midbattle, you forgot to spend a point and using it to learn the skill that turns the tide? That turns the fight into an anime climax. Sheet covered in eraser scuffs, beer stains, and doodles? That’s the character’s life story recorded as wear and tear. These things are so specific to the genre and the shared experience. An app is mechanically exact and weak to beer. That’s the opposite of what I want from a role-playing game.