Iron Arachne has been undergoing a lot of changes this year. It's the first year where I really started experimenting with using large language models for coding in general, and it was inevitable that I would try using them with Iron Arachne.
The results have been mixed, as anything with AI is going to be. On the one hand, I have massively increased the number of unit tests for the code base, which uncovered quite a few bugs that I didn't realize were there. I was able to rewrite entire subsystems in an hour or two that would otherwise have taken me weeks. On the other hand, LLMs are really, really bad at writing prose, and I am still trying to find and replace all of the AI-generated garbage text with human-written text. "Go fast and break things," indeed.
Of course, there are all the ethical and climate concerns about AI and AI providers. Balancing the need to keep current with software development technologies and the moral imperative to not, y'know, wreck the planet is difficult. I have more or less settled on a complex set of rules for engaging with AI that acknowledge its utility while still trying to contain its dramatic capacity for awfulness.
So, with all of that as background, here's what I'm working on with Iron Arachne.
Soon, you'll be able to download PDFs of characters you generate using the character generators. These have basic designs for now, but will get tweaked over time. Also, you'll be able to generate or write names for your characters in the UI for these. This makes it much easier to quickly produce a bunch of characters for convention one-shots.
I've been working on a region map generator for a long time now. It's still really slow and not ready for release, but I continue to poke at it every now and again. The way things are going, I might have it out by the end of the year. We'll see.
A fantasy merchant generator is coming soon. It's been in the code for awhile now, but I didn't bother cleaning it up for release until recently. It has a trade mark generator that's a new variant of the heraldry generator, details about the merchant, what they have in stock, and so forth. It's actually pretty neat.
There's also a fantasy potion generator in the works. Potions will be added to the dungeon generator at the same time. This is definitely a work in progress, but it tries to create interesting potions that may be variations on existing Dungeons & Dragons potions or completely new things.
All of the above is already in code and either done or actively being worked on. What follows next is everything that I'm planning for the near future.
At the moment the user interface on desktop is pretty rough. It's crowded into a narrow column in the middle of the screen. Up until now, this has been because I wanted to make sure the site works on mobile devices, and so I really didn't spend much time making the desktop design take advantage of the bigger screen real estate. Lately, though, it's been bothering me. Seeing what some of my peers have been building (see Hexroll's latest iteration), I've been inspired to expand the desktop user interface. This is in the earliest stages right now. I still want to support mobile flawlessly, so this is going to be a little difficult.
Another thing that is in the planning stages is a new character generator AND character builder pair. I first started this with AD&D Second Edition, and I liked how it went, so now I'm going to make a new set. I'm not saying what system it's for yet, but I will say it's popular.
On the less user-facing side, I have some big housekeeping projects in mind, too. One of them is to break up the user interface code into components that I can reuse and reorganize. Hopefully this will make it easier to quickly create new generators if I'm able to mix and match components. Another project in this category is to write more unit tests to improve the test coverage and uncover more bugs. As part of my graduate studies, I recently discovered a technique called mutation testing. It's good for testing whether your unit tests do what you think they do. I'm rolling that into my workflow so I can better catch bugs before they reach the public. There's also a lot of maintenance that could mostly be described as "making everything smoother and more uniform."
In other words, I am really busy on Iron Arachne right now.