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isn’t available anymore – we de-listed it a few days ago, because we’re working on new features and soon it would be outdated.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!