Beta Update #1 — Storyboard improvements, encounters, and a design makeover
October has been one heck of a busy month for us. We have been eagerly watching you create some great content with RPG Author. Yes, maybe it was a bit creepy, but our heart is in the right place!
We’re so glad that the tool is useful for you even in its infancy.
So far we have had 37 authors create 47 adventures with 74 locations and 132 characters. This is so awesome to watch, and I particularly love reading through the characters in each of your adventures. I learn quite a bit each time!
Although we have had initial success in helping you create your adventure content, we haven’t done a good job of making it easy for you to organize it in the storyboard. That’s on us.
By far the most common feedback we have heard is that the storyboard isn’t intuitive to use. We couldn’t agree more and that’s why we’re taking another stab at building your content organization interface.
Meet the new Storyboard!
Probably the first thing you will notice is that your content is always shown in the storyboard. This is a huge quality of life improvement as you will never have to leave the storyboard interface again to edit a location or add an encounter. On top of this bonus, you can now easily preview what your adventure will look like when you download it.
Secondly, on the right-hand side are the storyboard components. Rather than nesting chapter, location, and scenes elements like before, all your content is now easily displayed in a vertical content flow. When you are ready to add some new content to your adventure, just drag the component from the right into the content where you want it to get. It’s that simple.
Editing your content is now much easier as well. When you want to make a change, just hover over the component, click the ‘pencil’ icon and a sliding detail panel for that component show on the right-hand side of the screen.
Other Notable Changes
Scenes have been replaced by an encounter component
Initially, a scene seemed like the perfect content block your adventures, but they produced more confusion when discussing with some of you about feedback. We decided to call them … encounters. A risky maneuver I know, but we think more people will understand it.
An encounter can be added to any location by clicking on the “Add Encounter” menu option like this:
Worlds have been disabled for the near future
We want you to able to flesh out every inch of your world, but the feature set just isn’t there yet. Until we’re ready to provide you a great product for world-building we have decided to keep a laser focus on adventure creation.
Look for updates in the future about world-building.
Application design and user experience updates
You may have noticed in the screenshots that the design looks different for the application. When recreating our storyboard design we seized the opportunity also update the application interface. Personally, I am extremely happy with the way the application looks now and the technology side of me is so anxious about the rich interactions we can build for you in the future.
Storyboard Mobile Improvements
Although mobile is not at an ideal state yet for the entire application, we made a special point to let the storyboard scale down to smaller devices likes phones and tablets.
Now you can update any part of your adventure minutes before the game. We recommend you harness this new power to smite the murder hobo in your group!
In conclusion
- We gave the application a design makeover
- The storyboard received a design overhaul to improve its usability. We re-engineered to be more flexible for future components (i.e. stat blocks) and scaled it down to mobile.
- World creation has been temporarily disabled. Look for more news on this in the future.
- Scenes have been replaced by encounters in the storyboard
Changes coming soon
- Free artwork and map bundles
- The ability to create more brainstorms
- More storyboard components (tables, stat blocks, enemies, characters, and more!)
Start Writing!
That’s all the information we have for now. We hope you are as excited as we are to jump back in and start weaving some awesome adventures!
