shadowtorch

Shadowtorch is a simple torch-keeping tool for the tabletop RPG called Shadowdark. It is essentially an app to keep track of multiple timers. The design is focused on the old-school feeling of the game and kept simple and intuitive for users in how it mirrors a media player. I’ve worked on it alone, but the animated torch frames were made by @nyk_nck and the fire ambiance is by Mixit. It's deployed on Vercel using SvelteKit's adapter-auto.

It was well received by the community with many users providing valuable feedback and features they wished for. There were 4 most requested features, all of which I implemented afterward. The first was to add a blowout sound when the torch runs out – adds suspense for players. The second one was to have a downloadable Android/iOS app, the third was to add a global 10-minute decrement for active torches (game-specific reasons), and last but not least to have multiple themes to choose from.

The mobile app proved a little bit more difficult, at first I tried Tauri but its use for mobile apps was still in alpha then and far from polished. I’ve also tried PWA, but it didn't work well with precaching audio. In the end, I’ve settled on Capacitor and it worked almost out of the box - the .apk (Android app) is available as a Github release.