Hi everyone! After a couple of weeks focusing on our Criteria Courses (which, incidentally, are still undergoing!), we want to focus on something else that we’re working on that is directly related to how you design and organize your campaigns.

Back when we were doing the Kickstarter campaign, we received many questions about how players would be able to move between maps: would they have to join some sort of new session? Would GMs have to “teleport” them by hand? We knew those wouldn’t be an option (it would make for a poor gameplay experience), and that there would be a system in place for players to move between one setpiece and the next without needing to have everything in the same (huge) map – thus saving also resources in terms of computer power. But we hadn’t designed the specific solution yet. Now it’s time to solve that!

So, up until now, we were using a pawn asset to define the starting player spawn location on a specific map. Our teammate André realized that expanding this functionality would be the simplest and most elegant solution to our problem here, and now you can use this asset to teleport all players who are taking part in an online game, right to the location of another pawn asset – which can be on the same map or on a completely different one in the same campaign!

Making this possible is quite simple: the pawn asset has 4 new properties that deal with the teleport/travel feature. First is the Place Name, which identifies the place where the players will be transported to. Second you have the Destination Place Map, which tells in which map in the campaign is that pawn asset located. Third comes the Desination Place Name, the name of the pawn asset in said destination: there could be several destinations, for example, a dungeon with several exit points. And finally, you’ve got Travel: when the GM clicks the according button, all players will teleport directly to the correct pawn asset following the previously mentioned properties.

This seems like a small thing, but it’s way more convenient than having to load the new map and take all players manually to it. Just tell your players "please go over there" and they'll automatically show up at the new location! We hope this makes planning entire campaigns (with all the jumping between locations and setpieces) much easier.

We’re not working only on that, though – and we want to end this dev diary with some nice eye candy. Our teammates Bernardo and Eddy are working hard on implementing new visual effects for your magic and that kind of thing. Nothing we say here will be more spectacular than a few pictures, so here we go!

That's all for today! As always, we invite you to join our community on Discord[discord.gg], wishlist Multiverse Designer on Steam, and follow us on Instagram[www.instagram.com] and Bluesky[bsky.app]. See you in our next update!

Hi everyone! It’s been an intense week hard at work here at Toopan Games. We continue working on Criteria (don’t forget to check the first entry of the Criteria Course!), but in parallel, we are working on improving and/or expanding some features of the gaming module. We’ll go into more detail when all this is ready to be implemented in the next update, but we want to give you a small sneak peek at what will come next to Multiverse Designer.

The first thing we’ve worked on lately seems very simple, but it’s actually very important, as it’s one of the things you’ll do the most when playing: rolling dice! In a nutshell, we’re making our dice roll faster. We realized (and some of the feedback we received during the Next Fest pointed in this direction too) that it took too long for dice to finish rolling. Funny thing is that our dice rolls aren’t just for show, that is, we don’t produce a random number in the back and then show a dice rolling animation just for show: we’re actually simulating the physics of a dice rolling in order to get better randomness. Random number generator are never truly random, and use a numeric seed to produce their results, which can have problems further down the line: if you know the seed you can predict its results. To cut a long story short, we’ve improved the rolling simulation so it goes faster.

We’re also implementing new visuals for spell area effects. Like this!

Here it comes...
...and it goes boom!
And talking about areas, another thing we’re working on is trigger areas: basically, spaces in the map that trigger a specific effect when you step into them. Useful for traps, cinematic effects (like a wall crumbling in front of you or a roof collapsing right after you leave a room), reactive spells, and a long list of other cool things to t̶o̶r̶t̶u̶r̶e̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶p̶l̶a̶y̶e̶r̶s̶ create interesting situations in your adventures.

Finally, we’re implementing weapon selection for almost all characters – until now, in the beta your character model had a default weapon and you couldn’t change its visuals: if they were armed with a sword but your character sheet said it was a warhammer, you could change the stats rule-wise, but visually it would still be a sword. To do this, we searched the assets in the game and extracted about 200 weapons and shields from several of them. Then we created a system where players can choose which weapon will be in each hand. These aren't necessarily medieval gear, as you can see in the pictures below...

And that’s all for today! As always, we invite you to join our community on Discord[discord.com], wishlist Multiverse Designer on Steam, and follow us on Instagram[www.instagram.com] and Bluesky[bsky.app]. See you in our next update!

PS: Friendly reminder, please redeem your Steam keys, and if you haven’t seen yours in your inbox, send us a DM through Kickstarter so we can send it to you. Have a nice day!