First of all, I’ve started hosting DM Tools, The Worst Calculator, and GPX on Itch.io as well as here on my website. It’s been garnering a lot more traffic and hopefully will garner more use and feedback. You can find it there at: https://goblinpuncher.itch.io/dm-tools
Additionally, I’ve put up two updates in the last few weeks that I’ve not really noted here, one big and one much much smaller.
First of all, the big push to 0.6a is that I added a tile renderer to the map editor. This means that the map renderer is using a tileset to display the map data instead of my solid colors. Right now it’s just the one tileset, but I’ve tried to leave myself a lot of room to add in tilesets in the future and allow the user to swap them out so that there can be a little more color and variety to maps. From a user standpoint, it may not be that big a change, but from the backend there’s a lot of new code, a lot of rewritten and tweaked code, mostly because I wanted to add support for variable tile display based on what is around it. Before the code didn’t really worry about tile position, just the current state of that tile. I’m pretty proud of the results, though they are certainly far from perfect.
The smaller change to 0.6.1a is one that honestly might be more important to users, I modified the code that changes the state of tiles so that you can now click and drag to draw tiles across the map. This makes it a lot faster to put maps together, and takes a lot of strain off the fingers and wrists (as someone who suffers from RSI, I feel I should apologize, the previous method was just a lot faster to prototype).
The next big goal is going to be to reign in some of the more… esoteric choices I made in the UI and wrangle it to be a little more responsive and mobile friendly. I think this is going to involve a small rewrite to the Modal code I’m using right now. It’s easy to use from a code perspective, but it needs a little more flexibility for the user. In addition I want to add the ability to zoom and pan the maps because fingers a big and I’d love to be able to run games almost completely from a phone or tablet.
After that I would really like to take some of my DM notes from the homebrew setting and campaigns I’m running and offer them as “supplements” for the tool, make it super easy for people to use or modify the material.
A final word before I let you go. This tool is free, and I have a blast putting it together, but what with the pandemic and a lot of personal stuff I don’t want to get into, I would really appreciate it if you would consider donating some funds to help support its continued development. I’m not looking to make a wage or anything, just cover things like hosting costs and the like for another year. If you use the tool and want to contribute, you can donate on the Itch.io page: https://goblinpuncher.itch.io/dm-tools
And thank you.
