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What is Rosterizer?

Rosterizer is a powerful Army List Creator for gamers of all kinds. It allows you to quickly and easily create rosters for a large range of game systems, on the tabletop or for digital games. Rosters’ cost limits and selections are validated to highlight any errors, and the nested output will summarize your units’ stats and game rules for quick reference on-screen or via formatted text output.

Rosterizer is a webapp and therefore works on, and shares lists across, iOS and Android devices as well as Windows, Mac and Linux computers. All that’s required are the rulebooks (game data files) for the game system and army for which you want to make a roster. Many rulebooks are created and maintained by members of the gaming community—any that you’ve found while searching the internet can be linked to your account. Alternatively, you can make your own rulebook with the easy-to-use editor interface.

Recent Rosters

The recent publicly-visible rosters of beta users can be viewed below, minus most stats; only lists of assets will be visible without the appropriate game data. Why not sign up today to be able to view everything?

Past development updates:

2023—June

• The Kickstarter!—is not open yet, but will be this month. This month! We’ll send out another notice when it launches in a few weeks but the sneak preview is that it’ll run for 4 weeks with the goal of funding some software development help to carry us over the threshold of viability as a real service that someone might want to pay to use.
  Pay how much? Well, the plan is to offer the app free (and ad-free!) in offline mode forever. A free account will allow a user to nominate a single roster for cross-device syncing and sharing, while a $3/month account will enable “unlimited” sharing (and perhaps further perks we haven’t yet considered).
  Since going public with details about Rosterizer, we’ve fielded a number of questions about whether we had some sort of donation service to help keep us going. Well, this is the way and this is (almost) the day! Your financial support is what can help this project get on its feet, and your enthusiasm in spreading the word is what will help us cross the finish line.
  Thank you all for your kind words and support so far, and be sure to ask to be notified on launch in case you miss the next newsletter!
• Game Data—The release of a new version of a certain popular dark and grim sci-fantasy tabletop game has resulted in some attention being paid to Rosterizer, as an alternative to said game’s perfectly adequate but somewhat basic roster editor. We’ve been very fortunate indeed to have caught the notice of the developer of Yellowscribe, a utility to import game files into the popular virtual game platform Tabletop Simulator. Yellowscribe now supports Rosterizer list exports and as a result, we’ve attracted a group of dedicated volunteers who have been instrumental in authoring (so far, most of) this darkly grim game data into a format that Rosterizer can read.
  As a test of our data format and authoring capabilities, we couldn’t be more pleased; we’ve discovered that even non-technically-minded folks have very quickly ramped up to become deft hands at using our editor interface, which bodes wonderfully well for the future of other games’ representation in Rosterizer. I am truly grateful and humbled by the dedication, and attentive bug reporting, our volunteers have gifted us with; as busy as we’ve been with newfound attention, we would be stumbling mightily without the help of these selfless individuals.
• UI/UX—Not ALL of the beta testing has been “sunshine and rainbows” so to speak... Increased attention has brought increased scrutiny to our user interface which is, let’s be honest, a wireframe with a coat of paint. We do indeed know that we need improvement in this area, and have been making strides in that direction. The other side of the “frequent complaints” coin is “frequent feedback”, which is valuable and appreciated as a driver of constant improvement.
  The UI is, at this point, what we call “dev-ready” in that it works enough to allow a user to do what they need to do, but isn’t necessarily laid out in a way that makes sense for new users. We’re happy to disclose, though, that the first threshold of our kickstarter goal includes funding to hire a dedicated design firm to give the site a thorough analysis and redesign with respect to both the look & feel and the user flow as they navigate the interface.

2022—January

• Open Beta Is Live—We’d like to thank you all for your patience as we figured everything out surrounding stability, features, seed data, and user experience—and we’d like to invite you to join the public beta test. Now, it bears reiteration that this is a beta so things will not be perfect, but we are paying close attention to user feedback; most reported defects are solved within a few hours so don’t be shy about letting us know about problems (in #🐛-bug-reports and with steps to reproduce!) as they arise.
• Game Data—We know that list builders like this aren’t useful without some data to leverage, so we’ve put some effort into creating rulebooks for some popular games. The rub is that some games are fairly large, complicated and/or unfamiliar to our development team so you might (will) encounter data problems. The good news is that data for Rosterizer is intended to be community-sourced so if there’s an issue with a game you play, you can help contribute to fixing things up or creating a new rulebook; we have many tools to make this easier including documentation, a responsive dev team (in #🛠-data-authoring), and some automation utilities.
• Next on the horizon—The roadmap to public launch is one huge step shorter, but there’s still lots to do. The rough upcoming steps are:
  • Prepare for crowdfunding—Stability, features, and building an engaged user base
  • Crowdfunding campaign—we’re going to need money to hire some development help in order to make sure the product is smooth enough to consider “complete”
  • “Minimum Viable Product”—Cleaning up technical debt and getting the codebase ready to release to the public (remember, we’ll be providing source code when we launch so it has to be tidy)
  • Stretch Goals—post-launch, there is a staggering amount of new features we’re looking forward to implementing
  How can you help? By testing the site rigorously so we know what’s good and bad about it, AND by telling your friends to try it out, and sign up for this newsletter as well, so we’ll have the greatest possible chance of running a crowdfunding campaign successfully.
• Inventory View Mode—Previously, the default view mode was a card-style visualizer that worked well for smaller rosters. The inclusion of assets was done via a dialog window called the Asset Inventory. However, we found that many users were spending most of their time in the inventory, so we pulled it out of the dialog window and made it its own view mode. This is now the default view, but the view mode you select for your roster will persist (e.g if you like to reference or share via the text list view, your roster will remain in that view until you change it).
• Keyword Constraints—Multi-faction game systems were previously a bit of a headache to define which units/models were allowable. This led to some “anti-patterns” like the creation of multiple templated classes instead of relying on keywords to handle categorization. Now, we provide the ability to specify keyword constraints (statically or dynamically via rules) in order to define what’s allowed with more granularity.

2022—December

• Open Beta Update—Last time, we teased about when you all could get access to try things out. We’re close! No, really! One thing we discovered during the closed beta was that people really don’t like testing unless the data for their preferred game system is available so we had to take a detour to seed some test data. We’re about to enter the final phase of the closed beta; providing access to media outlets (YouTubers, bloggers, game news sites) so they can reserve their usernames and get familiar with the interface. Basically, the next time you hear from us, it’ll be open beta time.
• Video Promo—Thanks to the efforts of a member of our gaming group, Daniel Walker, we now have a fun video that we’ll be using to promote Rosterizer on various platforms in the future
• Text Output—A simple way to share your army, formatted to show only your decisions and what those decisions changed, for ease of reference. Also supports markdown exporting, for formatting preservation in places like Discord and Reddit (bbcode export to come in the future).
• Rulebook Importer—Users can now import rulebooks from a shared github repository. This will allow the community to publish data as it’s improved, and alert users when their data should be updated.
• Source Code—A funny thing happened when we went public about Rosterizer a year ago; we encountered a large number of people who were disinterested in a proprietary app because they had recently been burned by the abandonment, by its developer, of a similar proprietary app. We completely understand the hesitance of people not wanting to throw their support behind another product that could theoretically evaporate and result in a repeat of an uncomfortable situation.
  After considerable deliberation among our development team, and with the help of an attorney, we’ve decided to release the source code for Rosterizer when it launches. This would not be “open source” but rather “source provided”; the public will be free to view, copy, and change the code for private use. Additionally, we’ve built in a “kill switch” that converts the existing license to open source (the GNU Affero General Public License) if no updates are made for a period of time.
  It’s also possible that we’ll decide to go fully open source in the future; we plan to form an advisory board or steering committee, from among our engaged users, to help guide future big decisions like that.

2022—August

• Open Beta Timeline Restructure—In light of last week’s demonstration of the fragility of the current state of list-building, we decided to rethink our priorities. We spent a few days sifting through our backlog of “want to haves” to see what we really needed in order to open the beta to a wider audience. As it turns out, nearly 380 hours of projected work ended up not really being critical so we pushed those features off to post-beta. We still have some work to do, and so can’t provide a hard date right now.
• Rulebook Dependencies—Oh, what was the one feature we added? Well, we're still putting the finishing touches on it so it’s not available to the current beta users, but soon we’ll support rulebook dependencies. That is, data authors will be able to create a data file that’s imported by other files—in much the same way that other list builders have a rulebook for the game system’s rules and a separate file(s) for the game’s units, often separated by faction.
  Rosterizer now supports a more fluid architecture that allows smaller games to ignore this option, while much larger games may leverage multi-level dependancies; e.g. a Cosmic Soldier faction might import some generic Soldier assets from a separate rulebook, that in turn imports the game properties and unit-grouping definitions from the basic game system rulebook that all other alien factions also import from.
  Along with the arbitrary import depth, we also support modifying or even removing assets or properties of assets along the way; if SpaceBugs just never need a “Bunker” asset, it can be removed from the import so the data appears correct to users as they build their rosters.

2022—June/July

• Asset cut/copy/paste—Users can now move assets around a roster via customary cut/copy/paste functionality. Rosterizer uses its own clipboard to store cut/copied assets in order to allow them to be pasted anywhere they're permitted; even other rosters!
• Stat Ranks can add Traits—Stats can add assets to any other asset by way of dropdown selection. Here we see a stat on a unit adding a Killsaw to the Model(s) contained within the unit (when "killsaw" is selected from the dropdown, a killsaw asset is added in the right place)
• Editable Sub-assets—It is possible for a trait or auto-included asset to have had changes made to it in order to allow assets to include specific versions of other assets; perhaps it contains dynamic stats that have been altered, or it has sub-assets of its own.
• Rule Evaluation Results—Rosterizer’s conditional and rule system is powerful and flexible, but with power and flexibility comes complexity; novice authors might not understand why or how a new rule is failing. The info tab now provides a report of exactly what each rule is doing.
• Allow assets by template—Asset classes can be made to use another class as a template; now, authors can specify that template as an allowed class to allow all classes dependent on that template at once.
• Game Data Syncing—Users can now sync their rulebook from an online source, in order to share game data with friends more easily, as well as to ensure that their data is up-to-date. Outdated data alerts display in the Roster as well as in the Rulebook view, in order to not be overlooked.
• Data Migration Tools—In order to help data authors transition existing data from other sources, we’ve built some tools to augment the videos from the last newsletter in order to streamline the authoring process:
  • The Data schema diagram provides a visualization of what the data looks like so authors can easily see relationships between assets.
  • A term translation document maps the terminology used in Rosterizer to that of Battlescribe™, Rosetta-stone style, so experienced data authors of that format will be able to more easily understand the Rosterizer format.
  • A migration applet allows authors to import a Battlescribe and export a basic Rosterizer rulebook, with assets and their corresponding stats.

2022—May

• How-to intro videos—To augment our help files and tooltips, we’ve produced a pair of short videos to introduce users to the basics (and some intricacies) of the roster and rulebook editors. They’re on our youtube channel; take a look for a preview of Rosterizer in action!
• Publicly shareable lists—While we’re still limiting access to beta users for now, we’ve built a way for those beta users to share rosters with the public, to get a feel for how sharing will work when Rosterizer is publicly available. Public rosters are navigable via a URL, or list authors can copy a text version of the list for purposes of pasting in forums and online groups. Recently-created lists can also be browsed from the Rosterizer homepage.
• Asset swapping without rebuilding—In the event that a player has, for instance, mistakenly selected and built out a “command” squad and decides they want to switch to an “assault” squad, they can make that change without having to re-create the entire squad from scratch. This is also useful for instances where data updates invalidate assets by name; adjusting to the correct designation is now trivial.
• More powerful text interpolation—We previously had the ability to insert placeholder variables in a stat's formatting and text strings for purposes of inserting icons, dynamic values, and the like. We've expanded that to include stat names, current stat ranks or terms, all icons in order, and even an entire formatted string to permit data authors a great deal of freedom in their text formatting.
• Numeric stat constraints—Formerly relegated to tracked stats (whose values change and which require min/max constraints), now any numeric stat can have a minimum and maximum set, along with an option to provide smart increment buttons in addition to, or in place of, a number pad dropdown.
• Granular visibility for assets—Previously, we provided a way to determine when individual stats should be shown. We now have that capability for entire assets. This is useful for cases where everyone knows what traits a unit includes, and don't need them to be front and center; concealed assets can be accessed by selecting their parent asset.

2022—April

• Auth and beta signup flow—We now have the ability to process and accept beta keys, so users will actually be able to make accounts and log in (very important, we know).
• Test data seeded—In order to let testers actually do something in the app, and to provide prospective data authors with some examples of design patterns, we’ve seeded a variety of example data from several disparate game systems.
• Global tooltips—To supplement the help files we’ve added tooltips, to just about every actionable element in the app, to allow users who “learn by doing” to find their way.
• Stat visibility options—Some stats need to be visible all the time, some only when an asset is selected, and some should be hidden—existing for bookkeeping purposes but never visible. All of these options are now possible.
• Add traits via stat ranks—A bit esoteric, but this allows a data author to define particular assets to be auto-included in another asset just based on how its stat is defined (e.g. selecting a particular sponsor can auto-fill that sponsor’s perks)—it’s still possible to do this via rules but this is a quick shortcut for the simple cases.
• Stat/Rule cloning—And speaking of rules (…and stats), we now have the ability to import the structure of one rule or stat into another, allowing data authors to quickly copy complex patterns around their rulebooks for similar uses.

2022Q1

• Rule interface—The rule engine was completed at the end of last Q, and this Q sees the completion of the rule GUI! We’ve put the focus on point-click functionality, providing a rich set of suggestions for ease of rapidly targeting exactly what the data author intends, while reporting on syntax issues as they’re detected.
  And to demonstrate some of the utility of the rules engine to aid in bookkeeping, follow this link to a video of rules in action.
• New Authentication service—User account security and flexibility is critical, and our last auth service wasn’t cutting it, so we’ve undergone a huge effort to pivot to a more robust and extensible service that will allow critical features like useful error feedback, username flexibility, and more seamless automated testing integration.
• Dark mode applied—We’re very excited to have applied a dark theme as the beginning default for Rosterizer. Our research indicated that people who like light themes are fairly unopinionated, but people who like dark themes REALLY hate light themes, so dark-mode it shall be.
• Class templating—Data authors can now define an asset class (e.g. “Frigate”) to inherit its properties, such as stat formatting, from another class (e.g. “Warship”) and subsequently provide its own additional properties. This will allow multiple classes of Warship to exist in our example. We can take it a step further and define templates of templates, so a structure might resemble:
  • Ship (class) > Warship (class) > Frigate (class) > Excelsior (asset)
  A small feature, but one that enables more advanced inheritance; even of objects as large as entire rulebooks, which opens the door to fun things like layering crusade (or other campaign) support onto an existing set of game data.
• Beta invitation—Our beta invitation survey was a great success! Thanks so much to all who applied. We spent a solid two weeks analyzing the responses to determine an invite list of potential users who represent a good fit and a broad sample of demographics. We’ll be reaching out to testers in the coming weeks to get the admin side taken care of. We plan to phase in testers in small groups, to ensure that any obvious problems with stability or scaling don’t end up overwhelming us.
• A wild developer appears!—We’re very excited to welcome Ben to the Rosterizer development team. Ben is well-versed in the technologies we’re using, has a keen sense of user experience best-practices, and has already begun contributing to meetings and taking on tasks in a part-time support role. We look forward to accelerating our throughput in anticipation of getting Rosterizer into the hands of a wider audience!

2021Q4

• Dark mode design comp—By popular request, Rosterizer will default to dark mode. We’ve commissioned a design comp and will be applying it in the next quarter. By the time you receive the Spring newsletter, the landing page (and everything else) will be using the new dark mode styling instead of the current glorified wireframe.
• Rule interpretation—This was a big one, and was super important! In fact, it took up the bulk of this quarter’s development time. Data authors can now implement rules that will not only surface errors with roster composition, but will allow stats to be updated anywhere in the roster. Rules even support adding or removing entire customized assets.
• Plain text stats—A new kind of stat has been introduced. In addition to value (numeric) and rank (discretely defined) stats, we support term (plain text) stats. This allows unlimited ad-hoc options for a stat’s value without being constrained by numeric values OR having to define dozens of ranks.
• Custom stat rank indices—This one is a bit of architecture and UX combined. Now, ranks can have any shortcut name the data author desires. This results in more natural-looking rulebook and roster code as well as allowing adding or re-ordering ranks without ruining previously-created rosters.

2021Q3

• Recently Viewed—The last 10 rosters you’ve viewed are now accessible via a collapsible menu. This will reduce confusion about where to find that roster someone linked you to the other day.
• Drag and Drop—Re-order assets in rosters as well as elements in rulebooks via dragging and dropping. Very soon we’ll be able to support dropping in any legal container (such as dragging units between detachments).

2021Q2

• Object reset/copy/collapse—Reset: undo all changes to an asset, returning it to a “fresh” state. Copy: duplicate the asset as a neighbor of its original. Collapse: hide or unhide everything (that hasn’t been edited) about an asset (and its descendants). Collapse state is saved with the roster and persists through reloads.
• Code tab—Directly modify (or copy) the code of a specific asset (or classification) to allow quickly changing or copy-pasting complex resources.
• Asset disambiguation—More of a back-end change, but asset designations always include the classification name, so it’s possible to, e.g. have Luke Skywalker the pilot separate from Luke Skywalker the gunner.
• Help files—Instructions detailing functionality in every major aspect of the app: Index, Roster, Library, Rulebook, Stat Wizard, including a glossary of terms.

2021Q1

• Input suggestions—Text input fields that support referential terms will generate a predictive typeahead suggestion menu utilizing magic matching, allowing rapid selection during data authoring.
• Undo/Redo/History—Undo or redo through the edit history of any roster or rulebook, or select a particular history state from a menu. History length is constrained by total file size of the resource.
• Support including customized assets—As part of the “don’t break everything when there’s an unexpected asset in a roster” effort, we’ve added the ability to display any customized asset in a roster. Custom assets will display a warning, preventing organized play shenanigans.
• Stat wizard, ordering and grouping—Generate stats with a control panel that provides fields to define tracking, ranks, initial value, dynamic/hidden, display order, and grouping.

2020Q4

• Rulebook visualizer—View, edit, and author game data files with an inheritance-based interface. Define asset descendant classes, inclusions, stats, keywords, game text, and behavioral aspects.
• Markdown support—Text area fields support markdown interpretation, allowing for simple styling without having to mess with confusing markup tags.
• Asset inventory—Selection mode to add assets to a roster, supporting grouping, filtering, and asset previews.
• Icon picker—Generate a dialog to allow selection of icons to pair with stats or stat ranks, using the Game Icons font. Results are filterable and suggest previously-used icons.

2020Q3

• Site wireframe—Defined how the general modules of the site will function and generally look. Emphasis on function over form at this point.
• Define data models—Simple polymorphic data structure that provides for unopinionated data structure and arbitrary inclusion depth. Every item in a roster is an asset. Assets inherit from items which inherit from classes (This wizard inherits from the generic “wizard” item which inherits its basic structure from the “character“ class).
• Roster visualizer—View, edit, and create rosters from any rulebook. Emphasis on asset nesting in a card view.
• Data port—Interface to allow importing/exporting of rulebook/roster JSON data via a context-highlighted text input.