February Update

 Hello everyone!

There has been a longer than usual break in between updates as we are amidst the creative chaos  of recruiting new promising NED team members (soon our team will expand to 17 people!). We know you are all looking forward to the road map, but the process of recruiting new team members for NED resulted in some time constraints. While we are working diligently to release the road map as soon as possible, we are also prioritizing the swift onboarding of new members.

However, we’d like to assure you that our work is still going strong, and we’ve made significant progress over the last month and a half.

We’ve been working on Virtual Tabletop (VTT), which allows you to establish sessions, control Game Master roles, perform dice rolls, chat with participants, whisper and whisper roll and move minis right from your PC.

We took your feedback from Tech Alpha to the heart and introduced a completely new camera system. Instead of the three cameras, we now have two:

  • Top Down View, which allows you to view the NED in 2D;
     
  • Free Cam View, which allows you to view the NED from different angles.
     

They are also far more intuitive and easier to control thanks to overhauled key bindings.

We are about to finish dungeon planning from both design and graphical standpoints. We’ve spent a lot of time making blockouts, to test out how our system performs both in action and style. Thanks to that, we are able to easily root out potential issues and make sure that we are heading in the right direction. Now that we are reaching the conclusion of the design phase, we will focus on improving the dungeon as much as possible and add even more features and assets to make it a complete and enjoyable experience.

In the meantime, we are starting to work on a new iteration of the map generation system. Additionally, we are simultaneously working on teaching our AI model even more things, specifically content processing.

We’ve also designed The Fog of War, which is based on the standards of other VTTs. Moving into full 3D view gave us some considerable challenges, yet we are managing to pull all of this through.

We’d like to present you our gallery of assets and concept arts that were made by the talented members of our team:

To finish this update, we have gathered the most frequently asked questions in the comments and the answers to them.

Will we be able to import custom miniature models, like the ones we create on Hero Forge?

We will have the ability to create our own characters (similar to Hero Forge) and export them.This feature will appear after the release as an update – it is not a key feature, but we want to have it in NED.

How is NED different from Talespire?

In NED, you don’t have to build a map or create an adventure scenario, and our VTT is prepared for the option of exporting graphics to other platforms such as Roll20 or Foundry. And from the similarities – you will be able to roll the dice and move the figures of the characters 🙂

Will there be an option to disable/enable Fog of War?

Great idea. That’s our plan for the future.

What system do you plan to implement in NED?

At the start, there will be an open source system. After release, we will also add the ability to mod and add other systems. We want to introduce official licenses for the largest and most popular systems, but this depends on negotiations with our partners.

Cheers!

~ Spellarena Team

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