Lone Wolf Development wrote:Our mission with Realm Works is to streamline and improve the tabletop role-playing experience for both GMs and players by empowering GMs to create, manage, and share any world they can imagine. We're doing this in four ways:
First, provide tools for GMs to efficiently create and assemble materials for their games in a way that's simple to manage, organize, and search.
Second, let GMs reveal content to players as it's uncovered during play, without introducing extra work for the GM.
Third, enable GMs to share their creations and smoothly integrate the work of others into their own material, weaving it all together into their campaign.
Finally, provide a community repository where additional material can be obtained and easily integrated with any other content you have, including the GM's own creations, letting GMs build their games from whatever sources they find compelling or interesting.
The feature set is basically the obvious features for a campaign management system. They're putting a lot of focus on the indexing, which is a good sign. The auto-linking is a good idea, although it might have issues if you name things words that you use a bunch.
It's not clear how useful it will be in practice. If you have tons of notes anyway, it's probably an improvement, but for a rules-light, low-prep, discover-through-play style it's just going to get in the way.
UX is a potential issue; it could be crashy, buggy, slow, not support hotkeys well, all kinds of things. There isn't really a way to tell how stable and user-friendly it is without seeing unedited video of someone unfamiliar with it or an independent review. If their other stuff has been solid, that's a good sign.
146 people paid 100 dollars to get a lower price on the cloud service.
50 people paid 250 dollars to get it 2 months early.
17 people paid 500 dollars.. to beta test this.
All for product they've never used nor read a critical review of.
Kickstarter boggles my mind sometimes.
Last edited by Soda on Mon Feb 11, 2013 12:08 am, edited 1 time in total.
In this case, I'm guessing that they're donating a huge pile of cash primarily to make sure the thing gets funded and they get something, rather than having beta-test privileges for a utility. Or it might be the race to have the latest possible gadget that leads to people lining up to buy the new iPhone at full Apple prices when it is only very marginally better than the one they already have.
Soda wrote:146 people paid 100 dollars to get a lower price on the cloud service.
50 people paid 250 dollars to get it 2 months early.
17 people paid 500 dollars.. to beta test this.
All for product they've never used nor read a critical review of.
Kickstarter boggles my mind sometimes.
Kickstarter campaigns rely on the fact that the campaigner is padding his "donations" with his own money that has been handed off to family and friends so that he can reach his minimum goal.
This is why stupid-expensive donation amounts exist. It pads the donations taken in so that fewer friends/family have to launder fewer donations for you to hit your goal.
Then everything else taken in by real fans is gravy because you don't have to deal with a failed Kickstarter and butthurt fans.
Last edited by K on Mon Feb 11, 2013 6:48 am, edited 2 times in total.
Chamomile wrote:In this case, I'm guessing that they're donating a huge pile of cash primarily to make sure the thing gets funded and they get something, rather than having beta-test privileges for a utility. Or it might be the race to have the latest possible gadget that leads to people lining up to buy the new iPhone at full Apple prices when it is only very marginally better than the one they already have.
Apparently, the programm will be released anyway.
WolfLair... wrote:Unlike many software Kickstarters, initial Realm Works development is nearly complete. We've been evolving Realm Works for over three years and will be releasing it in July, 2013. Numerous features are already in place, as we demonstrate in the video, but there are many more we want to include in the initial release. Your support of this Kickstarter will allow us to accelerate our current development efforts so we can pack more features into the product in time for its public release.
Here's a summary of the most important features:
Quickly develop new content and revise existing ideas for any genre (e.g. fantasy, sci-fi, modern) and any play style.
Effortlessly manage diverse content, including images, maps, Hero Lab portfolios, statblocks, audio, video, and virtually anything else.
Intuitively organize content for on-demand access and review during play, placing everything at your fingertips for quick and easy retrieval. No more leafing through pages of notes to find the information you need!
Determine exactly what information is known by the players and what remains hidden at a glance.
With our patent-pending Fog of World™ technology, Realm Works makes it a breeze to incrementally reveal and display every aspect of your world to players, requiring only a single mouse click. Revolutionize how you share your world with your players, easily showing them only what they learn during the game.
The incremental reveal of maps makes it trivial to illustrate to players what has or has not been explored or discovered.
Connections between your content are automatically detected and created, allowing instant access to all the interconnected elements of your world.
Flexible navigation tools let you instantly view any aspect of your world as easily as browsing the internet.
Track and visualize all the relationships that exist between selected content in your world. Realm Works makes it easy to manage secret identities, view relationship diagrams like family trees, and even track attitudes between or among NPCs or characters. Keeping track of hidden schemes, subterfuge, and actual motivations behind the scenes has never been easier.
Immediately see what the players learned during a particular span of time. You can find exactly what was learned during the last game session, making recaps before the next session fast and accurate. You can even view a summary of everything the players have learned during the entire campaign, even if it spans many real-life years, and instantly access the details associated with that content.
Full text search instantly locates what you need, and you can tag any content you wish and leverage the tag for filtering your content. This is extremely powerful in conjunction with Realm Works’ cross-linking capabilities, allowing instant access to the content you seek.
Place pins on maps to indicate significant locations, events or encounters. Use these maps for navigation to immediately access the information associated with individual pins.
Fully customizable templates get you started building your world immediately and let you smoothly organize diverse information about all the people, places, things, and events in your world.
Enter your own original content just like a word processor or efficiently cut-and-paste from source material you already possess.
At a glance, see all the connections for whatever you’re viewing, both to and from other content. Instantly see everything that references an important NPC or item.
Weave the critical story elements of your world together and visually outline your plots, whether they are epic quests or minor story arcs.
Create custom calendars for your world. Link multiple calendars together and see how all the dates translate to your master calendar. Calendars can reflect different in-game cultures, lunar calendars, and worlds.
Conveniently manage game notes and preparation tasks with full linking to game content.
Easily show material to players during and after play without having to create additional, separate materials for them.
Last edited by Korwin on Mon Feb 11, 2013 6:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
I'd like something to support concept mapping tied to a wiki, which Realm Works seems to do... but out of curiosity, does anyone know other software (other than Scrivener, which I will check out).
