A week ago I was inspired by living battlemaps, animated top down maps rendered in CG for use in tabletop games played with a projector or upon flatscreen television.
I set to work, obsessing over a piece of software and developing it to the point it is now. I present, the DMGE, the Dynamic Maps Game Engine: http://dmge.digitalforge.ca
I enjoyed working on this a lot, and felt a passion in developing it that I hadn't felt in a long time.
Now, I want to take it to next level and I've established a Kickstarter, and have been telling EVERYONE on the internet all about it!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/456611271/dynamic-maps-game-engine
What is it?
What I'm hoping to develop is a new type of map tool that allows people to use any sort of assets they want as their map pieces! This isn't like Roll20 where you upload a library of stuff. The library is your hard drive, and you don't upload anything!
The system currently lets you load (not upload) any static image, animated image, video or even PDF as your battle map, configure a custom grid, and a fog of war that you can remove as you play. I developed this over the course of about four days with input from a few wonderful people on reddit.
Today marks the last week of my Kickstarters window and I've posted new rewards to excite my existing backers and entice all new ones.
I want to build you a robust offline game play tool that will allow you to play with any sort of material you own. You don't need an account, you don't need to upload anything. It all works right off your hard drive and the system is limited only by your browser, your computer and your own library of resources.
Click and drag pdfs, and videos into the page and it will create references to your hard drive (securely using established HTML 5 protocols and methods) that you can then mess around with to create your own arrangement of a battle map. I've put together a quick proof of concept here. Scalable, draggable and rotateable elements that snap together or just sit upon one another. The proof there is literally twenty minutes of work plus Dynamic Dungeons awesome Dungeon of Skulls set.
Given that I am a week out, I am pushing to reach the finish line with several physical rewards care of our own Jessica Jefferies who is now officially a collaborator on the Kickstarter!
Hand knitted pieces including dice bags and an amigurumi dragon!
If this works out, then inside of a few weeks we will have a very powerful tool that allows flat screen and projected table top gamers to play using any sort of arrangement of elements quickly and easily.
If you know someone who plays using a television table top or projected surface area, let them know about this!