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, wishlist Multiverse Designer on Steam, and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky. See you in our next update!