Dragon Warrior Monsters Guide

This website I built is a guide for the popular 2000s GameBoy game Dragon Warrior Monsters. It's a game that's near and dear to my heart, and I've spent countless hours playing it. It's a game similar to Pokemon, though for everyone I know who played it, the typical narrative is that it's better than Pokemon. In any case, it's a story game with monster catching and training where the monsters come from the other games in the Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest franchise. The big hook of this game was that you could breed your monsters together, which mechanically worked as combining two monsters to get a new one. There's such wild depth to that concept and it created a crazy fun gameplay loop of breed -> train -> breed -> train where you just really wanted to create some of the strongest, coolest looking monsters available to you.

Anyway, my app covers the breeding combinations that the game contains, as well as exploratory information, such as where to find each monster, possible breeding opportunities with some of the NPC's monsters, what skills each monster has, and more. If you're wanting to re-live the game again after all these years, this is a great tool to help out with that! The game is still a JRPG, and can be pretty slow paced and grindy at times, but playing on emulators and using a guide can bring out more of the fun again if you're not into those things anymore.

Check it out here!

How it works

The site isn't very technical generally. It uses a Go net/http server + templ for building out the html templates. At first I wanted to use htmx too, but that's way more complexity than a site like this needs. Instead it's just a plain good-old-fashioned HTML server. There's only a tiny bit of javascript on the front end to help with some convenience of features. As a result, the site is generally fast, with the first page load being extremely quick. Each page will be cached for you by your browser, so reloading old pages is lightning fast of course.

The data for the site is copied from some of the ancient TXT guides from back in the day. I wrote a small parser in javascript to read through the file and structure it into something that can be reasonably used in Go.

The philosophy I wanted to follow when building this site was that everything should be a link. I want the site to be very exploratory - as in a user should be able to explore their way around the concepts of the game like it's wikipedia or something. Curious about something the page mentioned? Just click. No searching around required. I'm super happy with how that part turned out. I still want to add a decent amount more as well to make linking around even more cool.

One of my favorite features is The Farm. Sometimes you want to answer the question "I have these monsters available to me, so what can I make right now?" Instead of trying every single combination through the game or trying them all one by one through the site search, you can use The Farm to just build out what monsters you have along with their genders and then it can just spit out all of the products available to you. The best part is that the site automatically remembers your farm, sort of! Since I chose to make the site full HTML - I ended up using basic forms for The Farm too. This means that your farm is stored in the query parameters. You can just save the link as a favorite, or navigate back to it, or however you want to use that. I really love that, and it's just an awesome feature that's baked into the old internet that people keep trying to reinvent with javascript frameworks.

I think that's it for now. Check out the site! Busy busy busy...