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!

Hi everyone! Now that the dust of the Steam Next Fest has settled, it’s time to resume our usual schedule of updating you about what we are working on in Multiverse Designer. Before moving on, though, we want to thank everyone who downloaded the demo and tinkered with it for a whole month, and of course, all the people who wishlisted it on Steam. The Fest was a massive boost for this project, and we appreciate all the attention, support, and useful feedback that we have received.

Now, if you have checked, you will have realized that the demo isn’t available anymore – we de-listed it a few days ago, because we’re working on new features and soon it would be outdated. And what are we working on, you are surely asking? Well, there’s some cool stuff about spell effects, trigger areas, and weapon selection, but we will talk about that at a later date (probably next week). Because this week we will be focusing on something else that we are working on: we have started to implement D&D 5ed rules in Criteria, so Multiverse Designer can automatize game rules for you – that is, do the bookkeeping of keeping track of things like initiative, HP, skill checks, attacks, spells, resistances…

But the short-term important consequence of this is that we are using these efforts to record an in-depth course on Criteria, so you all can learn how to use it to implement your own rules (or to tweak the ones that we’re implementing when the time comes). With this course, modders will be able to create and implement whole rulesets (which then can be shared through Steam Workshop!). As an example, we’re posting the first video here, where we explain how to create a character sheet – that is, not how to fill a character sheet, like when you’re rolling a new character, but how to design one from scratch.

This is an essential part when implementing the rules of a game – on the one hand, you have all the abstract rules, like “to hit an enemy, throw a dice, add your attack stat, and if it’s higher than the enemy’s armor class, throw the damage of your weapon”. On the other, character sheets give you the information that you need to interact with these rules: in this example, what’s your attack stat and your damage output, and what’s your enemy’s armor class.

This Criteria Course will always come in two forms: a step-by-step video tutorial, where we will explain how to do something from start to finish, but without going into the fine detail of every single thing we’re seeing. Then, after we have explained the big picture, we can go into the finer detail of explaining what everything is and does. And we will also keep updating and expanding a glossary with the definition of every term that we have mentioned in the tutorials, which is easier to access for reference and quick searches to refresh your memory further down the road. Sometimes these explanations will be double, giving you the definition of a term within the general context of tabletop RPG as well as its definition within the specific context of Criteria. You’ll understand the format when you see it! We’ve posted the first video here for your reference, but go to the Steam Guides section to see the first chapter of our Criteria Course.

We can’t wait to see what our wonderful community does with Criteria when it’s fully implemented and documented!