Hey everyone! We’re happy to announce that there's a new update coming, and with some very anticipated features. It’s been a very busy month (you’ll see why), but this update is going to be one of the most important in a good while.
The next update implements gameplay – at last, you will be able to play in the maps you create or download! It also comes with the first Criteria rules (so Multiverse Designer automatizes some of the bookkeeping and rules for you), although both things are still limited and a work-in-progress. Basically, we have implemented basic D&D-like rules: rolling dice, HP and initiative tracking, full character sheet editing, basic and special attacks, over 20 common skills (Hide, Spot, and many others) and 3 spells, namely fireball, lightning bolt, and cone of cold. It also includes two ready-to-play encounters – one against a wyvern and a second against humanoid monsters. And of course, if you want to do the bookkeeping and rules-tracking yourself, you can already play on any map you have created or downloaded.
The second new feature that we have implemented is the ability to customize your in-game avatar: that is, you’ll be able to create a character in the Character Forge, customizing its face and body as well as its character sheet tied to a specific set of rules (because obviously a D&D character sheet is quite different from, say, a sheet for Call of Cthulhu). Players can do this offline at their own pace, and it will be shared with their Game Masters when they connect to an online game. Then, when you play your character model will be the avatar you have created.
There’s another new feature coming that is meant to make Game Masters’ life easier. We call it Campaigns: basically, it’s a way for GMs to create an overall script of an adventure (or, well, a whole campaign). When you create a game you decide which ruleset you’ll be using, what maps it will include, what encounters players will face… You can think of it as how a pen-and-paper book presents a campaign: it describes the special rules, the locations, the NPCs… In the case of Multiverse Designer, it can be as simple or as complex as you want – you can set it as a loose guide or as a very detailed script of how the adventure will evolve.
This new update is expected to drop by the end of this month. We’re looking forward to seeing your first games on Multiverse Designer!
Multiverse Designer comes to the Steam Next Fest!
As we just said it’s been particularly busy as of lately, because we didn’t just work on all these new features – we’re also taking part in the upcoming Steam Next Fest, so we had to work on creating a demo for Multiverse Designer as well (as you need a free demo to take part in the festival). We didn’t want this opportunity to become a distraction, in the sense of delaying the development and delivery of new features to you backers, so we decided that the easiest course of action would be to make a demo out of the beta version backers have. It will be available for a very short time, though – so if you want to nudge some friends to try Multiverse Designer for free (and who knows, maybe even play a game with them!), do it fast, because in a month or so we’ll take it down! Mind you, if you want to play online with somebody who’s not a backer, both of you will have to use the demo version. Due to how the Steam backend works, there is no crossplay between different “games” – and for Steam, a game and its demo are different applications.
And now that we have announced we’ll take part in the Steam Next Fest, we want to ask for your help just one more time. As you know, we’re a small team developing a very big and ambitious tool. We need every bit of promotion, every opportunity under the spotlight if we want Multiverse Designer to grow for many years, even above the original vision of the Kickstarter campaign – and helping us with that is as easy as important: please share our demo and ask your friends to wishlist us on Steam (if you want to take an extra step or play with some friends, you can download it too!). It’s as simple as that. During the Next Fest, the more people download the demo and wishlist the game, the more publicity Steam gives us; this event can be a make-or-break occasion for any game, much more for a tool such as ours, which let us tell you it’s not easy to promote – there aren’t that many media outlets or influencers who talk about virtual tabletops! So, by spreading the word, you can make a world of a difference – every single download and wishlist counts.
Thanks in advance for your help. See you on our Discordserver, and make sure to share your creations if you have access to the beta or when you download the demo – we can’t wait to see what you can do with Multiverse Designer! You can also follow us on Instagram and now Bluesky. See you in our next update!
PS: Remember that we have sent you the Steam keys that will unlock your Kickstarter exclusive content further down the road. Please check your inbox and spam folders, and send us a DM through Kickstarter if you can't find them, so we can re-send them to you. Have a nice day!