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LK Weekly: Surprise Feature Announcement - For those who color outside the lines...
🕑 Added 2021-11-05 16:37:46 +0000 UTCFor this LK Weekly, we're thrilled to announce a major new feature dropping soon. Seriously, remarkably soon (not SOON™️).
(prototype UI, not final) Direct link if the Patreon video embed isn't working: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxpn3VA2P1s
Honestly, this is as much of a surprise to us as it is to you. As you can see on our Planned Features page, we were already interested in idea boards but didn't plan to build them for a long time. Last week, they weren't even at the top of our priority list.
But sometimes, the world changes, and you should remain open to serendipitous opportunities.
In this case, the critical change was new features for a fantastic whiteboard library that Braden has been sponsoring for a while. Braden got the news and started prototyping. Within hours we were looking at a demo that had us excited. We asked ourselves, "Should we drop everything else and launch this? Can we build it this quickly?"
Our answer: Yes. We are planning to launch the first version of Boards for everyone within the next few weeks.
Initial Board Features
We want to move fast and keep the scope small, but we think you'll love the first version. It will include:
- Collaborative editing that also works offline (like all other LK features).
- The ability to place "Smart Cards" that represent wiki pages.
- Integration with LegendKeeper Assets to add images.
- Visibility controls (i.e. hide/show from players).
- Board management so you can make lots of boards and find them again.
- Shape connecting arrows for making dynamic flow charts.
- Essential whiteboard tools such as shapes, text, freeform drawing.
- Excellent positioning tools for quick alignment and layout and Adobe Illustrator style hotkeys for a great workflow feel.
Please do leave comments with features you'd like to see! We have a lot more stretch goals planned (search indexing, @-mentioning boards, etc.), but those will come in a follow-up patch.
Board Workflows
We have a few workflows in mind, and we'd love to hear from all of you how you might use such a tool. We imagine you'll build incredible things with this. Some use cases we've thought of:
- Mood boards
- Quest design flow charts
- Relationship charts
- Quick whiteboarding with players while playing online
- Point crawl design
An important note: We do not see this as a substitute for the timeline feature. We may also still build a completely different system for relationship graphs. We still think relationships and time are core worldbuilding concepts that require more thought and some new systems.
We DO think that Boards will help provide a nice solution for you to use in LegendKeeper while you wait for us to turn our attention to those other systems in the future. ****
Always lots to do in worldbuilding 😅
Thoughts, feelings, requests?
Let us know what you want in Boards by responding here on Patreon or commenting in #beta-discussion in Discord. It's early days for this feature, and we expect it to evolve rapidly with your help!
Tree Dogs (other stuff from this week)
We've been pretty focused on vetting the Boards feature, so there's not much else to report this week.
Braden launched a big update on Tuesday with a ton of the onboarding work we've been prioritizing, as well as several quality-of-life improvements. It's a huge release so you should read those patch notes if you haven't.
Adam wrote the first draft of onboarding emails we plan to send to new users whenever they sign up. Once those are done and our new login screens launch, we will be finished with our Onboarding tasks for the time being.
Adam has engaged the creator of exlibrisrpg.com to help finish our little Mork Borg Bestiary. This is a continuation of our experiments with publishing awesome RPG content. He is optimistic it will be launching before December.
We'll leave you with these happy little Tree Dogs as a sneak peek.
That's all for now!
TEAM LK
Comments
Braden
As you can see in the demo, lines already can bind to objects. Labels binding to lines will have to come in a later update just to minimize scope on this development cycle. Certainly possible though.
Love this feature. Please include two things: The ability to label a line directly and the ability to have a line stay connected to a card or other object while it’s moved. Tons of diagramming software use these two things to great effect! Having to move the labels independently from the lines, and the lines independently from the cards will make the tool far less useful and dynamic.
John Doe
While I like this feature A LOT. I do feel a little sad that the editor v3 has been delayed by this.
