Aspects

An organizer for combo-making games.

What is this?

Aspects is a MEN stack (MongoDB, Express, NodeJS) application that allows the user to keep track of a list of elements, as well as the mixes a player of a combo-making game would be able to craft from them.

For example, we could add an Air aspect and an Earth aspect, then say that those two are an input for a Dust aspect.

After using it for long enough, you get a well-meaning soup of connected items that looks something like this:

How do I use it?

Starting the server

1. Ensure you have NPM and NodeJS installed on your machine, and have access to a MongoDB server.
2. Clone this repository to your machine.
3. Run npm i in the root directory of the cloned repository to install the dependencies.
4. Copy the .env.example file provided in the root directory of the cloned repository into a new .env file. Fill it out as necessary.
5. Run npm start or npm run dev to kick the server up.

Using the client

1. Open your favorite browser and navigate to the address noted when you kicked up the server.
2. Use the Add Aspect section to add new aspects.
3. You can review your existing aspects in the Aspects section.
4. Click on an aspect in the Input Aspects or Output Aspects section to remove it.
5. Drag your desired input aspects to Input Aspects, then drag your desired output aspects to Output Aspects.
6. Hit the Clear button if you'd like to start fresh in the Input Aspects and Output Aspects sections.

Notes

The application does not yet have user authorization, so all resources are generated without locking them to a particular user. I recommend using this locally for personal reasons as a result.

As you drag aspects into the Input Aspects section, the client will check if there is an existing mix using that combo, and update your Output Aspects to that mix's if it does.

As you drag aspects into the Output Aspects section, the client will update the outputs for the mix with the given inputs.

As your mixes update, the client will render a PlantUML diagram showing the connections between your aspects. When you have a lot of aspects, this can get wild to look at. If you click the diagram, it will open in a new tab.

The images you upload are hosted in the public/imgs directory of the application.