Development Video Update - Drawing Tools and Year in Review (Patreon)

Hey folks, for many of you this post will be "old news", but I realized that I have not been consistent about posting the Development Video Update series here to Patreon. For those of you whom have not watched the latest installment yet on Drawing Toolks and a "Year in Review" - I hope you'll take some time to watch this update and learn about how things are progressing with the project!

Video Transcript Below

Hey everyone, I'm really excited to create this new Foundry Virtual Tabletop development video update as there is a lot to celebrate for the project and I am eager to share that news with the community. I'm going to divide my time in this video between talking about the overall status of the project and showcasing some new features which are included in the very latest Beta 0.3.5 update which is available now for Patreon supporters!

In the background while I cover these updates, I'm going to create a new Scene from scratch using the fabulous Broken Compass map by artist Tom Cartos on Patreon. Tom is a newly emerging map-maker with a beautiful and clean style of crisp lines and a life-like color palette and he's well worth your support. As with most maps, I like starting with the background and walls, after that I'm going to populate the scene to bring the store and grounds around it to life with a bunch of non-player characters. You'll see me take advantage of the wildcard token feature to randomly select images from a folder of eligible artwork options. This trick can be a huge time-saver in setting up scenes where you want a bunch of "extras" standing around to bring more realism to your world. Lastly, I'll set up both day and night versions of the area by configuring ambient lighting for the night version of the same map, and I'll showcase some new dynamic weather effects which can contribute even more ambience to the environment.

A key topic for this video is a sort of "State of the VTT", because this week marked a very special anniversary for me and the Foundry project. One year ago I wrote and committed the first lines of code to explore the idea of whether I could use modern web technologies to provide an elegant and feature-rich virtual tabletop platform that would be DM and community focused - through a self-hosted application, with an emphasis on content ownership, and a powerful JavaScript API to empower the creative modding community. This was a huge endeavor and one I didn't know would succeed, but standing here one year later is hugely satisfying as I see so many of you embracing this same vision and running your game sessions week-in and week-out using the application. 

It's really humbling for me to not only see and hear your direct feedback, but more importantly to see the effort you have put into sharing this project with your friends and your own communities. It's only because of that outreach that I can proudly celebrate achieving a goal around the number of Patreon supporters prior to launch that I really believed was unrealistic. Looking back at the past year, the project was in pre-alpha development for just four months before Alpha testing started in November followed by Beta testing since February. Since the first Alpha build there have been 32 released updates encompasing 794 commits and well over 1000 stories on GitLab. Overall, it's incredible progress and I just wanted to take a moment to reflect on how far the project has come in its first year, and look forward to all the exciting milestones still ahead.

With regards to upcoming milestones; I wanted to share updates about the release plans for the product. I am targetting a version 1.0 release in January, 2020. This is a few months later than I had originally hoped, but the beta testing experience so far has helped me understand the full set of features that I want to insist on for release, and I'm confident that when that time comes I'll be selling a much higher quality and feature-rich product than I had initially envisioned. Some of the most significant systems that will be developed between now and release include: map linking and travel points, event trigers for scripted interactions, rollable tables and card decks, support for dice pools and nested expressions, an expanded effects system for weather and particle effects, a user-macro and hotbar system, status effect tracking, and automatic update management for community developed modules and systems.

On the topic of community developed systems, I wanted to use this video as an opportunity to showcase some of the phenomenal work being done by developers in the FVTT community. This scene is created inside a World running the Pathfinder 2nd Edition system, which was officially released at the beginning of August. Our community member, Hooking, has done outstanding work to get a fully featured and live game ready system and sheet implementation off the ground for PF2e. His system includes fully interactive character sheets, management of inventory, spellbook, skills, and feats, and dice rolling automation for attacks, skills, checks, and more. If you're a PF2e player, this work makes Foundry VTT a fantastic option for running your game.

The next topic I'm excited to cover is a huge new core feature that just released with the 0.3.5 update. This new feature is Drawing Tools providing the ability to collaboratively sketch shapes, textures, lines, and text to improvise visual features in your game. Drawings created with these tools are vectorized for fast rendering and efficient performance. There are four primary tools type  for drawing shapes: rectangle, ellipse, polygon, and freehand. Each drawing can be independently selected, resized, and re-configured. I'm going to run through some of those configuration options here.

Aside from basic sizing and positioning of shapes, each drawing can be fine-tuned to configure it's line art, fill color or texture, and text label. Fill options include color, opacity, and tiling texture, and all of these options can be combined with any shape type. I'm going to demonstrate how this drawn rectangle can contain a texture fill which can even be further tinted to customize its appearance. The line borders for each shape can be customized to adjust the line width, color, opacity, and smoothing factor for freehand illustration. Additionally, every drawing of any type can have an overlayed text label which gives these drawing tools a ton of reusable flexibility for lots of different situations. 

Placing a new drawing is simple, just activate the Drawings layer, choose your preferred tool type, and click away. To edit a drawing once it has been placed you can double click on the drawing area to open the configuration sheet where you can adjust all its properties. Drawings are visible to all players, unless they are hidden and they are shown above the Scene background and any placed Tiles, but below the grid and placed tokens.

Each Drawing can be further controlled using it's heads up display, activated via right click, which allows for real-time adjustment of the drawing's visibility - which will concea l it from any non-GM users, locked state which can prevent the drawing from being inadvertently resized or moved, and z-index ordering - a new feature for both Drawings and Tiles which allows for customizing the layering of overlapping drawings by bringing certain objects forwards or backwards in the stack.

As I mentioned before, all of these properties apply to every drawing type - so the freehand tool becomes extremely powerful - allowing you to sketch, texture, and label any shape that is required to illustrate or improvise a feature of your world. Furthermore, the default configuration for a new drawing type can be altered at any time. By default, new drawings are created in the assigned color of their author, but you can override these defaults to conveniently create a large number of drawings with a certain visual style. 

There is a ton of versatility in this system, which can support use cases ranging from idle doodling during session downtime to meticulously pre-planning encounter maps by drawing buildings, geographic features, and terrain obstacles. You may worry that not all players will be responsible with the power drawing tools provide, so you can control access to these tools by granting (or not) the Trusted Player permission level for users whom you trust to sketch responsibly!

I want to continue putting the spotlight on some amazing community work which is happening to take advantage of the Foundry VTT framework for game system development. This footage shows the beautiful and unique Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying, 4th Edition system developed by community members Edmund and MooMan. The two of them have done a truly phenomenal job of capturing the exact look and feel of Warhammer with a feature rich and game-ready system. I'm excited to showcase some of the high-level features of their work. 

The Warhammer system has really gone above and beyond to make the entire look of Foundry VTT consistent with the classic theme of that IP with custom UI elements and evocative aesthetics. The character sheets for the Warhammer system are beautifully done with support for all the core character attributes as well as skill progression, talents, combat equipment, abilities, and character traits. The sheet also incorporates a built in dice roller which assists with key rolling mechanics that required for Warhammer gameplay. 

There are many little touches here to appreciate, for example, Map Notes which allow you to denote places of interest within your world by dragging Journal Entries onto the Scene have been provided with a unique set of Warhammer-specific iconography. Also the authors are hard at work on establishing a rich set of game-ready compendium content complete with monsters, abilities, character traits, and more.

I've got to also highlight how beautiful this map is - it's a city map drawn by Caeora on Patreon. He and his collaborators; Dungeon Fog, World Anvil, and the Great GM have teamed up to create the very exciting Project Deios - a software tool to help us non-professional map makers to create their own world, city, and region maps using beautiful textures and assets in this same artistic style. I had hoped this video might be ready to go before the end of the Project Deios kickstarter, but unfortunately I've missed that window by a couple days. Nevertheless, please look it up and consider supporting yet another fantastic tool that is in development for the VTT space.

There's also an exciting development on the D&D front - I am thrilled to share a partnership with Stryxin from Forgotten Adventures to bring the D&D Monsters compendium to life with his beautifully drawn token artwork. We are working our way upwards, starting with challenge rating CR0 and CR1/8 which are already completed. These compendium entries are game-ready with stat-blocks, pre-configured actions, monster features, and hand-crafted biographies, authored by community member Penelope, to help spark your imagination. 

One final core feature I want to share is that now every placed Token can have it's own independent data and item overrides, even if multiple tokens all refer to the same base Actor. This strikes an incredibly powerful balance between flexibility of data and simplicity of UI and organization. Note in this video that I can configure these four bandits to each specialize in different attributes, even though all four tokens were intiially based upon the same Bandit Actor.

Alright folks, that's it for me with this update. Thank you all so much for your continued support of this project. Please check out foundryvtt.com and patreon.com/foundryvtt for more info. Cheers!