About a year ago, I put together a small add-on for Fantasy Grounds to add a metric calendar (or Stardate calendar) to the extensible calendar system of the virtual tabletop (VTT) Fantasy Grounds because I was contemplating an attempt to GM a one-off session, maybe two, for “Star Trek Adventures” and thought it would be nice to include Stardate logs in the campaign’s calendar.
The metric calendar addon is open source and you can pick up a copy for free from its releases, or build it yourself with the attached build script, if you want to save a (literal) quarter or see what add-on development looks like for Fantasy Grounds.
I put it on the Fantasy Grounds Forge for a quarter, and out of every quarter spent on it I get roughly 15 cents. After about a year and change of it being on the Forge I can safely say that I’ve made “candy bar” money from sales of it. It amuses me each time one of these payments arrives, they truly are tiny, but it also makes me happy that scratching my own little itch resulted in enough side income pay to buy a whole candy bar.
After many decades of failed or unfinished projects, I suppose that I’m officially now a “professional game developer” having received candy bar money for at least one effort. (That also amuses me about this.)
As far as I can tell I’m one of the few Fantasy Grounds add-on developers using source control and source control automation, so I think I’ve now promised at least a small article/guide on doing that, to help that community take some of their efforts to the next level. I would like to do that for them.
Also, if you haven’t yet tried Fantasy Grounds yet, I can recommend it as a nice VTT for many game systems. Just recently Fantasy Grounds became free-to-play (YouTube announcement video), focusing on a business model of selling the books for game systems over the software itself. I think it’s got some advantages over other VTTs because it is “offline-first” rather than “cloud-native”. It’s Unity-based game client copies everything needed to play locally and a GM can use it offline or even allow play over a LAN disconnected from the internet (as long as everyone’s client versions are synchronized). (Not that I’ve attempted that yet, but I may in the future. I like that it is possible.) Of course you don’t have to take my word for it, it is cheaper than ever to start trying out Fantasy Grounds, and of course I’m a little biased because Fantasy Grounds has now made me enough side income to buy a candy bar. I’d love to see them continue to succeed in a ever more competitive VTT market.