At the start of 2019, we set ourselves some ambitious goals for the first half of the year, and we’ve come a long way since then. In this blogpost, I want to take a look at some of the steps we’ve taken in 2019 as we have made some major advancements despite our small team.
Maturation of the platform The central parts of the site have all been finished, adding many features missing at the start of the year, such as sticky topics and locking discussions on the forum, seeing the changes between wiki pages and a big overhaul of the messaging system. This maturation included giving more control to campaign owners and moderators to decide who is allowed to do what. All in all, the forum and wiki now work as someone familiar with these would expect them to.
Visual improvements We have made some major improvements to the code used to display your campaign, and because of that, you can now personalize your campaign through theming and you can add your own background image. We also added galleries to allow you even more options to visualize your world, your characters and their possessions.
Better data access Back in 2018, we unlocked schema’s - already used for people, places and factions - allowing you to add your own for things like ships, religions, and whatever else you may come up with. Those schema’s generate indexes to get an easy overview or search through them and can be a great help for players trying to figure out what’s what. We also added an in-depth search to the site, allowing you to quickly find things even if you don’t remember what exactly that darned NPC was called again.
Pathfinder A major addition for 2019 was the addition of the Pathfinder system, including fully automatic character sheets that pre-calculate many of the basic values, and supporting the addition of things like custom races and classes as well as several house rules.
Dice rolling In the past weeks, we’ve been working on expanding the dice roller, and just this week we finally added it for the last system - with a few minor additions to be finished by the end of the year, which means that you can now roll dice for your character in all supported game systems.
These five categories do not include many minor fixes and updates that were made throughout the year, but they cover the major advancements. In the next blogpost, we’ll look ahead at 2020 to see what other features we’re looking to add in the first half of the year. Do you have any features you’d like to see added? Be sure to let us know in the community forum!