Symbol Tracker provides Destiny 2 players with an easy to use website, to unlock the secret Deepsight chest in the Vow of The Disciple, King's Fall, and any future raids.
- Complete site overhaul.
- Significant UI changes.
- Complete rework of code structure.
- Added support for Vow of The Disciple raid.
- Open Graph Protocol support added.
In September 2022 I started learning Web Development, and wanted to put what I had learned to the test. One of the first project ideas that came to mind, was a website to guide players through unlocking the secret Deepsight chest in the King's Fall raid. For a more design oriented answer see below.
You can, but Symbol Tracker provides a much smoother user experience. Why? Let's say you're doing the King's Fall raid and want to unlock the Deepsight chest. What usually ends up happening is, maybe you take a screenshot of the symbols you need or type numbers in chat to remember them. Now, either you know all the symbol locations off the top of your head, or you look at a video / picture guide. If you're using a video guide it can be frustrating to find the part of the video you need, or maybe you need to rewatch part of the video, so you try and rewind it but end up rewinding too far or too soon, which is frustrating. If you're using a picture guide, you have to scan the picture for the symbol you need, read the description, but maybe its not detailed enough, so you end up finding a video guide anyway. Not to mention, if you are taking a screenshot of the symbols you need, that takes up storage on your device. If you raid a regularly, that's a lot of bytes being eaten up. This is why I built Symbol Tracker. It provides convenience. It gives all Destiny players an incredibly easy way to unlock the secret chest.
Great question! And yes, I did release it back in September. On the initial September release, Symbol Tracker only had support for the King's Fall raid and looked considerably different. If you are interested in having a look here's a link: [old] Symbol Tracker. I would also like to add I never origianlly planned for Symbol Tracker to be available to the public, as it was just meant to be a personal project to apply what I had learned. The turning point came a few weeks after I had finished the first iteration of Symbol Tracker, as I felt I could significantly improve the quality of the site, in terms of the UI and how I structured the code. Fast forward till now, I can say I am happy with what I have been able to achieve in this short amount of time, and look forward to further improving the site.
Considering the past two raids (Vow of The Disciple and King's Fall) have both contained an almost identical way of obtaining a secret Deepsight chest, it seemed logical to implment a section for the Lightfall raid, as it is incredibly likely it will have something similar. Especially now, as crafting is becoming a more integral part of Destiny.
This definitely took some consideration, as I only wanted to show relevant information. The idea to keep the Lightfall section for the live release, actually came from me wanting to use an awesome transition animation I created. Ultimately I decided against using it for this purpose, and instead put it as the background animation for the Lightfall section, where you will also find a live countdown until the Lightfall release date.
As you can imagine, developing this website took a great deal of time and I will continue to update this site for as long as Destiny 2 recieves new raids, so I created a Buy Me A Coffee account to allow anyone to help support future updates to Symbol Tracker and my future projects.
Yes! Updates will come in the form of adding support for new raids, UI updates (improved desktop layout), and overall bug fixes. On a more techinical note, I would like to explore adding a backend to this site to reduce the number of HTML files being used. For each raid, Symbol Tracker requires 11 HTML files, 1 to select the symbols, 9 for the symbol locations, and 1 for the chest unlock page. Thinking long-term, and assuming Bungie will implement a secret Deepsight chest for each new raid, that would mean 22 new HTML files per year, if a new raid releases every 6 months, the HTML files will pile up. Expect an update to the site in the next 1-2 months.
Stay tuned...