A few years ago my brother gave me a copy of a role playing game called Mouse Guard. The premise being you were little mice in the forest going around fighting the evil weasels and trying not to get trampled by a moose, caught up in a snow storm or eaten by snakes in the mean time. It came with a map with a rich story about each of the locations you could visit and characters you could meet along the way.

Now I wasn't familiar with the setting and wanted to have the information close at hand while we played without having to pause and look up information every few minutes so I decided to turn it into an app.

I had just started learning Ruby on Rails so naturally it is a Rails App. I then decided on using leaflet, an open source javascript library for maps, to program the bulk of the functionality.

The app let's you create markers on the MouseGuard map with leaflet, link them to the Ruby Database and update any information about the location including pictures and what the players got up to whilst there.

Today we'll have a look at the app, how it was built, what challenges came up, how I then added in custom leaflet features and eventually got the behaviours I was aiming for.