Having a look back at year’s end has become a tradition, with us doing so for the last three years. The counterpart of that traditions is looking forward to the next year, so let’s get to that without further ado.
Improving RPGpad is an ongoing process, and we will rarely be able to state that something is unequivocally done. Because of this, some of the things we plan to do in the upcoming year were already mentioned earlier, either in the fall roadmap, or as items in look back at 2020:
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Performance charsheet/game system The character sheet performance is still a point of improvement, and is taken from the fall roadmap verbatim. We have made progress here, but on older tablets the slowdown is still very noticable. We want to prevent RPGpad from becoming a barrier to playing your campaign at the table, so we count this as one of our goals for the year.
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Implement additional game systems This is an upgraded version of the fall roadmap’s Implement D&D 5th edition item. We really want to get to work on 5th edition support, as well as support for a few other game systems. To keep on track, we will focus on the systems that are used in campaigns on RPGpad, but that are currently using the Custom game system because RPGpad lacks support for them.
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Polish and Quality of Life We will keep on working on the polish and quality of life. These will often be small things when viewed separately, but they add up to significant improvements when taken together. As stated in the look back at 2020: we have made good progress, but this doesn’t yet get a ‘mission complete’ rating. Over the year, we will smooth over any rough edges we discover, and we would be very glad if you tell us about any of those rough edges and annoyances you run into.
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Additional theming and customization Unmentioned in both the fall roadmap and the look back, we want to improve how you theme and customize the esthetics of your campaign. As stated in Colours Again, our goal here is to make sure you can adjust your campaign’s theme to produce the right atmosphere for your campaign.
Next to the above long-term goals for the year, there’s also the specifics of what we are working on right now:
- Technical rework of themes We are currently working on technical changes to they way theming works. This includes a complete rework of the way colour themes are constructed by us, and how the selected colour theme is applied to the layout of your campaign. At first, we wanted to go at this as a single large chunk of work — however, new insights have made us reconsider, and instead of we have decided to split this up into a series of smaller steps. The first step is currently in the works!
- Preloads for World of Darkness With the campaign configuration overhaul, we are now in a good position to reimplement the game system preloads for World of Darkness campaigns. The preloads were disabled a while ago as part of our oWoD / nWoD / *WoD plan, and we feel we are in a good position to revisit them and get the preloads back up and running for our improved configuration.
Both of these jobs are progressing along at a good pace, and we will update you about their progress in future blog posts!
As always we have prepared this week’s changelog for you, even though it is devoid of any visible changes. If you have any questions, ideas, or suggestions for us about the plans for the upcoming year — or any other topic, really — do open a thread in the community forums!