Forge Feature Roadmap

[kakaroto]

Hi everyone,

Since its initial public release, The Forge has evolved rapidly with many incredible new features being added on a regular basis. The development for the service has been mostly about resolving any immediate issues along with a plethora of small improvements, while progressively working on a set of larger features. Over the course of a few months, we’ve implemented successively the following major features :

• The backend system for the Bazaar to allow instant and quota free installs of modules and systems (July 2020)
• Added support for Paypal payments (July 2020)
• Rewrote the assets library backend as well as its UI along with a few other UI revamps around the site (September 2020)
• Added the Game Manager and User manager features, (October & November 2020)
• New Bazaar UI for browsing modules, systems and worlds (November 2020)
• Big Infrastructural changes for the Forge services (January & February 2021)
• Launch of the Bazaar marketplace for purchasing content from the talented creators in this community (February 2021)
• D&D Beyond integration (April 2021)
• Website overhaul (August 2021)

These are of course, only the major features that took months of work, but you can follow up on a more detailed changelog here : Server update changelog

Current Features Roadmap

The feature roadmap for the coming year on The Forge is not set in stone, but I usually have a pretty good idea of the 2 or 3 major features that I have in the pipeline. My current focus is on the following features :

• D&D Beyond Integration
• Polish and stability
• Bazaar improvements
• World Builder’s automatic backups and restoration

D&D Beyond Integration

This feature has been in the works for many months now. It was first started back in August 2020, and it’s been slow going as I’ve had many other high priority features, as well as the time it takes to discuss things with D&D Beyond and get formal approval to go ahead with this project.
I’ve announced it to my patrons in January and an initial beta release a few months later. This is still an ongoing project, though progress has been slow, and the amount of work needed is large.
It is one of the big projects planned for this year, and we should have a more fleshed out implementation with many quality of life improvements in the coming months.

Polish and Stability

This might seem extremely weird to have that as a “major feature on the roadmap” as it’s something we continuously work towards, but I do want to have that on the roadmap as something that I will dedicate my focus on. In the past months, I’ve seen many small feature requests, or small little issues that count towards improving the polish of the service, and the problem is that handling all of them has become a “death by a thousand needles” sort of situation, where even if fixing this one little thing would only take 5 minutes, fixing the entire list of a thousand small issues would take months of dedicated efforts. I am also planning on hiring someone full time to be able to constantly work on these types of issues and keep the Forge website as polished as I want it to. By having someone dedicated to this work, it means that this should be able to happen in parallel to another large feature in the roadmap.

Examples of such small polish issues:

• In the Assets Library, being able to do a “filter current directory” instead of a “search the entire library”
• Make the “Save changes” in the game manager section for changing the default Foundry version, more visible
• Add an outline around the “assets” default cover image for asset packs so it is more visible in dark themes
• Add a ‘spinner’ when marking a game as favorite to show that the change is being performed when on a slow internet connection
• Add a way to remove an existing license from your account
• Add a way to delete your account without needing to contact support
• Adding a “Contact” page with a submission form instead of linking a mailto: url with the email address
• Add two-factor authentication support
• Add the ability to choose which compendiums to create in the shared compendium module.
• No need to try idling all games when installing an assets pack from the bazaar
  etc…

More Bazaar updates

The Bazaar has been on this roadmap a few times before, first to get the quota-free installs, then to add the new UI, and then it’s to add a marketplace to it. As some of you may have noticed, the Bazaar has a Premium modules section which gives access to the Foundry protected content, as well as a Forge exclusive Premium content where you can purchase marketplace content or unlock access to some Patreon exclusive content through Patreon-linking of your account. We want to improve on the current Patreon-linking offering, as well as improve the overall user experience of the creators who want to add their content to the Bazaar to make it easier overall to create and release content for Foundry.

There is more to do to improve the current Bazaar UI as well, and I want to add ratings and user comments and things like that, but that might not make it this round.

World Builder’s automatic backups

Of course, the World Builder’s feature of auto-backup and reset of a game to a specific past session is still something that needs to be done so don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about the Time Machine feature that some of you are so excited about. It still is in the roadmap, and there’s been a lot of progress made on the backend needed to make the feature work, but more work is needed before it’s ready for public consumption.

Conclusion

That’s it, that’s the roadmap for the next major milestones that I expect to happen on The Forge. There’s no real ETA on any of them, and the order they appear in isn’t necessarily reflect their priority or the order in which they would be implemented.

Let me know if you have any questions or feedback on this.
Thanks!

[kakaroto]

Roadmap update:

The Bazaar is (partially) done and has been removed from the roadmap. I’ve added two tasks to the roadmap now : Improving the payment management interface, and infrastructure change.

Here is a copy of what I had originally planned for the Bazaar, it might help keep track of the progress.

Bazaar

My current task is to work on the Bazaar. The Bazaar is the “Systems & Modules Installer” of The Forge, or you can also think of it as the “marketplace”, but I don’t like that term because it implies buying, but the Bazaar will be a mix of many things, and most of those will be free.

The reason why I think this is one of the most urgent features is that other than providing a way to install systems and modules (and worlds and assets) and having those packages auto-update when you launch your game, one important feature of the Bazaar is that if you install a package from it, it does not count towards your data quota.

I know that a lot of users think the 500 MB Data quota limit is low, but it’s actually quite high if your Data is only used for your worlds, because on average, a world takes only 6.1MB (according to the average of 2233 worlds from all user data directories), so 500MB is enough for a hundred different worlds, much more than you would ever need.
The real problem is when you install many modules or big systems (D&D 5e takes 61MB, PF2 takes 81MB and WFRP take 147MB for example) that take a lot of space, but I want everyone to be able to install modules without using up any disk space at all.

The urgency is made greater with the recent release of music and map packs modules which can take a couple of hundred MBs. I’ve made a temporary solution for that, but not everyone is aware of it and also not everyone knows that the modules are not supposed to use up your quota.

Post-release thoughts

The Bazaar is up and running for a few days now, and it seems to be going pretty well! It’s doing exactly what I wanted it to do, which is to free up everyone’s Data from system and module use.

What I originally had in mind was a bit more elaborate, with a complete and slick user interface. Think of your favorite Play Store, where you can search, see screenshot, reviews, comment on a system or module, etc… That’s what I wanted, but I didn’t get time to do it, and realized it would take a lot more effort actually, while the integration I did with Foundry’s installer worked out great already, so it became less of a priority.
This means that the Bazaar isn’t done yet, there’s still the UI portion of it that will need to come back into the roadmap eventually. For now however, I’m happy with what I have.

[kakaroto]

Another update with one major milestone finally achieved!

I have done a lot of improvements over the last couple of weeks with regards to the payment processing system but the major change is the ability now to pay with PayPal!

I will spare everyone the headache of explaining how ridiculously bad Paypal is! Sure, it’s great for users, I myself like to use Paypal when paying online, but from a developer’s perspective, it’s really really bad, and I guess people put up with it just because of its popularity. I had tried to do this back in May already, and I had to give up on it eventually, now I’ve redesigned the way I’m doing things and it’s much better, as it simplified the whole thing and it allows me to offer the free trial to Paypal users as well.

One big change as well is the new payment details screen. It may not look very different to you because the UI is practically the same, but it was entirely rewritten to use the Vue.js library, a reactive components framework that makes writing dynamic UI incredibly easy (at least, much easier than what I attempted to do before). This is important because I used that as a test bed for myself to learn how to use Vue and get myself ready to create better UIs. This will be extensively used for the new Assets Management interface, so it’s good that I got that done.
I wanted to also redo the subscription selection screen with Vue so it’s much smoother when you make changes to the UI, but I think I’m going to leave that to some other time as I’m eager to get started on assets, and I really want to finally do the story teller features! Yes, that interface could be improved greatly, but it’s not as urgent as the other stuff, so it can wait.

Regardless, I think I’m done now with the payment processing improvements. There’s still a few smaller things that need doing and I will keep slowly improving that aspect of the site, but I’m moving on now to concentrate my full attention on the assets library revamp.
That’s going to be a big task because it will involve a major rewrite of the backend that handles the assets, before I can tackle the actual user interface, and as usual, I do everything I can to make sure it has the least amount of impact on running games, but you should expect some maintenance period at some point when it’s all ready (I expect the maintenance would just be “you can’t upload new assets, but you can still access your existing ones”).

Here’s a list of the things related to the payment processing that I still want to do and expect will slowly be rolled out during the coming weeks as I do small updates while I work on the next big thing.

• Show a direct link to the latest invoice and have a “Pay Now” button if payment had failed on it, so the user can trigger retries manually
• Automatic retry a failed payment if the user updates their payment details
• Rewrite the subscription manager UI to use Vue.js and be a better/more reactive UI
• Allow removal of extras from the plan when upgrading to a higher tier
• Add option to gift a sub to someone

Here is the original plan for this that was in the roadmap, keeping it here for archival purposes. I think I managed to do most of what I had set out to do, so I’m happy about that!

Payment processing improvements

I know that after the Bazaar, the next task was going to be Assets Management, but I feel like this is a slightly more urgent thing to take care of, so I’ve bumped it to the top of the list. It’s also because it’s a rather simple and quick thing that I will do, whereas the Assets revamp task will be quite extensive and take a lot of my time before it’s ready.

If you’re wondering what this task is about… just checkout the current process needed in order to change your billing information and you’ll understand how badly needed it is.

What I basically want is these things :

• An area to change your billing information and payment methods
• A quick link to view your payment history and invoices
• Add Paypal support
• Add warning notifications on the site when your payment has failed so you can be aware of it (for those who don’t check their emails)
• Add a new Extra option to allow to increase the asset file size limit (so you can use UHD maps without having to upgrade your tier if you don’t want to)
• Allow plan upgrade with disabling extras (for those who don’t need the extra quotas anymore on a higher tier)
• Automate the locking/unlocking of accounts based on payment status

That last one is because at the moment, I need to check daily on who has failed to pay their subscription (due to credit card issue, insufficient funds, or blocked by bank while they verify the purchase is legitimate, etc…) and when a subscription has failed to be paid after multiple attempts, I need to lock the account (which usually results in the person finally noticing the emails I send and fix the problem), then once the invoice is paid, I need to be notified about it then manually unlock the account again. This takes time and is annoying, so it’s better if I make the website take care of that automatically, so it can free me up to do other things than handle these issues every day.

[kakaroto]

After about a month of hard work, and a huge amount of testing, I’m happy to say that we’re getting close to the new assets revamp being done!

For those of you who missed it, last Friday, I launched Phase 1 of the assets revamp. Today, I’ve just launched Phase 2. This was very stressful, but everything went well so far, so I’m happy.
There are two more phases to the whole process, and let me detail them here and explain what changes you’ll notice in the coming days.

• Phase 1: Asset download proxy
  In this first stage of the migration, I’ve setup a new proxy that sits between the S3 storage which holds all of the asset files and the geo distributed CDN network that serves the files from 42 locations around the world. Now instead of downloading the files directly from the S3 storage, the CDN goes through my download proxy which will allow me to use the new assets redesign in a much more efficient way, and also eliminate one issue I’ve seen happening due to the S3 storage from the DigitalOcean provider having ridiculous low rate limiting (750 requests per second) which the CDN servers were sometimes hitting.
  This whole system was set up on a Kubernetes cluster, and a lot of my time in the recent month was to teach myself Kubernetes and how to set things up properly. This is really good news, as it means it can now scale automatically based on demand, and will allow us to always have good performance serving the files. It also serves as “A foot in the door” so to speak for my 3rd big feature on the roadmap, which is the infrastructure change that I spoke about before.
• Phase 2: Multi-upload optimizations
  Today’s release adds multi upload optimizations. Well, it does much more than that, it actually replaces the entire assets library backend with the new revamped system, but because I can’t jump into the new design right away, I also have a compatibility layer in between, so that people who are currently already playing a game, or haven’t refreshed their browser’s page, would not have any issues uploading files. I also didn’t want to put everything available to use right away until I’ve tested things in the live production server and made sure it works, before I flip the switch on Phase 3.
  In the meantime, the biggest change you will notice is that when you upload files through the assets library page on the Forge (not yet from the import wizard), it will do batch uploads of multiple files so that the uploads are faster and more efficient. Have a look at a little demo showing the optimized uploads vs the previous method (and notice how most of the time is spent extracting the zip file contents!).

Forge Assets Library: Multi-file uploads

• Phase 3
  Once this is in use for a while (12 hours should be enough), I will enable phase 3 of the update, which will be the removal of the legacy compatibility layer. It will give us… Phase 3 is now live, and it gives us the ability to actually use the new assets library backend to its full power, and allow things like renaming the assets and an even higher level of optimizations to make file uploads efficient and fast (i.e: if the file you want to upload was already uploaded and available on the server, you can save your bandwidth and it will be copied directly from the server without you having to actually upload it). This should be coming tomorrow, though the rename functionality is not yet implemented, it should be done soon (I might even be able to finish it before tomorrow’s release). If there were no issues so far with the mass uploads from the assets library page, I will also enable it in the import wizard. Multi-file uploads are now supported in the import wizard, and file and folder renames are also available from the assets library.
• Phase 4
  This would be the final phase of the assets revamp, and will be the rewrite of the file browser to have a more rich interface, allowing things such as drag & dropping files and folders for example and selecting multiple files for delete. This is not yet done, and will be what I’ll work on in the coming weeks.

One big item that will be missing (and which I’ll consider as a Phase 5) will be the auto-rename of assets within all existing worlds. I realized that doing that would be extremely time consuming (both to implement but also in terms of CPU usage per operation), and I’ve decided to drop it for now, so I can move on to other tasks. I’ll come back to it later, but in the meantime, when renaming files, a warning will be shown to remind the users that if they rename a file that is in use in a world, then that asset will become broken and they’d need to manually change it to the new URL within Foundry. Hopefully that’s enough to take care of most potential issues.

Once the new UI is built, I can move on to the next step in my roadmap: Adding Story Teller features, more specifically, the ability to have one separate URL per world and auto switching of worlds based on which URL is being accessed. I’m very excited to finally be able to do this.

[kakaroto]

Aaaaaaaaaaand it’s done!

I’ve finally finished with the task of the assets revamp. The new UI is now available on the site and you can now select multiple files to delete or drag/drop them to move them to other directories, rename your files, you can also do batch uploads that go blazing fast and saves bandwidth for everyone! I’m really quite happy with the overall results of this Assets revamp project and I hope everyone is too.

I’ve managed to achieve most of everything that I wished to do, and more, but there is one thing that I didn’t get to, because it turned out to be extremely complicated to do properly: automatically renaming files in worlds to match file renames/moves.
Although I now have a design on how to achieve that optimally, it would still take a lot of time to implement it in a safe and risk free manner, so I’ve decided to drop that feature until the next time I revisit the assets library functionality, so I can move on to the more important/urgent issues to tackle. For now, there’s a big warning any time you want to edit a file or folder’s name that warns you that it will break content in games that reference those files, and I think that’s an acceptable solution for now.

I’ve had a lot of fun designing the new system, then implementing it, I’m also quite happy with my newfound skills at making reactive and usable UIs.

The next task now is going to be adding support for multiple game URLs per account and automatically switching the world based on the URL being accessed. That’s the Story Teller features. I may or may not decrease the scope again and leave the “auto sign in” features until later, depending on how urgent it becomes that I upgrade the site’s infrastructure as demand is growing and it slowly becomes both difficult and costly to maintaining it manually. I’m really excited about these, since that’s the original feature I wanted to do when I started this over a year ago now (we just celebrated the one year anniversary of the first commit! And launched a Contest to celebrate it too), so it basically took a year to get to a point where I could implement this feature. Can’t wait!

And for archival purposes, as always, here’s the original roadmap feature text which I’ve now removed from the first post :

Assets Management

One of the most requested feature is the ability to rename assets, as well select multiple files to delete, or drag & drop an asset in a different directory to make it easier to organize files after upload.

This is unfortunately not just a change in the UI, but it will require a revamp of the Assets Library system to even allow it because of how the S3 storage that backs the Assets Library does not allow for renames, only copies, and it’s rate limited to 2 copies per 5 minutes (absolutely ridiculous), so I want to create a new abstraction layer to allow for instant renames and moves and deletes, and it will allow me to bring back one of my original optimizations from before I moved to this S3 storage, which allowed me to save user’s bandwidth and time by doing a local copy if the same file had already been uploaded by another user, so you wouldn’t need to upload all your assets, only the new unique assets. I’ll also use this opportunity to improve the upload process to allow batch uploads in parallel to speed up big imports for example.

This feature will also allow me to do smart in-world renames, which is something I feel is needed before renames are even made possible. What this means is that if you rename an asset and that asset is in use within one of your worlds, I need to update that world to use the new asset URL automatically so it doesn’t break it.

[kakaroto]

Hey everyone,

First phase of the Story Teller features has been implemented. I’ve started with redoing the UI, so I can actually have something to test the feature with, and that involved changing the entire website UI for the game listing and game setup pages to use the new (to me) Vue.js library which makes working with a reactive interface so easy to use.

The UI now supports the ability to have multiple games, though you can’t make use of that feature quite yet. You’ll notice two toggles now, “Game Manager” and “Automatic User Management” (in the Configure Players sidebar) which is how I named the two major Story Teller features. The options are disabled and can’t be enabled yet, not until I finish implementing the features in the backend and testing them properly to make sure it’s working without a hitch.

I know that I’ve said before that it would take one to two months to do these features, but to be honest, the last month has been crazy with all sorts of administrative tasks that have made progress on this slower than I would have liked.

The good news however is that I now have a good system in place for doing daily backups of everyone’s worlds. This is something that I’ve been working on for a while and evaluating the solutions available and I’m finally happy with one backup service that I’ve subscribed to (after I thoroughly vetted and reviewed them) which handles the hard parts of that process.
This doesn’t mean that if you delete your data, I can recover it for you, so don’t expect that, you’d still be responsible for backing up your games on your own. It means however that in case of catastrophic failure (a comet slams into the datacenter, or a dragon melts it with fire, or a hag causes all the drive to start spinning in the wrong direction) and all drive data is suddenly lost, then I can recover everyone’s worlds from the backups. Recovering from the backups would overwrite every user’s data at once, which is why recovering a single world is not possible and it would only be used in the extreme cases to recover every account. I don’t expect to ever need it, but it’s good to know that it’s there.

I’m still working on the game management support. That will be where it would map every Foundry world to a Forge game url. Once I’m done with that, I’ll add the automatic user management, where you’ll be able to auto-join your games without having to go through Foundry’s join screen, and once you invite a player to your game, their Foundry user gets automatically created, etc…

I have some more exciting ideas planned, so we’ll see how it all goes from here. I’ll keep you posted on the progress, and thanks for being patient with me, I know a lot of people can’t wait to see these features available!

[kakaroto]

Hey everyone!
A little change in the plans! I know I was going to do the Game Management features first, but once I was done with them (yeah, it’s done ) I realized that users had no way of installing modules and systems anymore since the Foundry setup page becomes unavailable. So I had to bump up my 3rd roadmap feature and make it a higher priority, and so, I’ve worked this past week on adding the new User Interface to the Bazaar, and I’m quite happy once again with the results.
The important part is that all the functionality from Foundry’s setup page is now replicated in The Forge, and I’m not blocked anymore by that. I expect to continue and finish the Game Management features next week and make that release. After that… we’ll see if I’ll also do the User Management features as well, or leave that for later. I know that having one game URL per world is the most pressing and most anticipated feature.

The only thing missing for now is the ability to create a new world from within The Forge itself, so once I finish adding that, then go through another round of extensive testing, this task will be done and released. I’ll probably investigate just how much effort will be required of me to do the User Management features too, and if it’s not too bad, I’ll do them as well before moving to the Infrastructure revamp.
That task is feeling more and more urgent to me as I have to create and destroy virtual machines manually based on usage and it’s getting tiring for me to constantly monitor usage and configure/shutdown new servers, but I’ve been making some small progress on that front at the same time in the past few weeks, so I’m hoping it won’t be a massive undertaking at this point. Then I’ll move back to the Bazaar, but this time, it won’t be so much about creating the UI, but rather about adding a store so creators can sell their content to users. I’ve received a lot of interest on that, so I can’t wait to get that implemented.
The current Bazaar UI is what I consider “basic” though, and my plans included a much more rich interface, where you could click on each package and see the full description with more metadata information. You would also be able to leave comments and rate the modules, and see the average rating, and also sort by “Most Liked” instead of “Most Popular”. Those plans were not included in today’s release because they aren’t necessary for the Game Management release, but they are part of my original vision for what the Bazaar would look like.

Before I get to those next tasks on the roadmap though, I feel like I need to rest a little bit. Rythm of War, Book 4 of the Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson will release on November 17th and so I will be taking the week off to devour that book.

That’s it, this is probably the last update before the final “Story teller features are implemented and live!” update that I’ll do later when I update this roadmap.

For now, have a look at a quick little demo of the Bazaar’s UI :

Bazaar UI demo

Enjoy!

[kakaroto]

Here I am with the final update to the Story Teller features! It’s all done

I’ve pushed the latest updates this week and documented the changes in the Server update changelog
For those who haven’t been following, the Story Teller features have now been released under the names : Game Manager and User Manager

The Game Manager, once enabled will allow you to have multiple Forge Games (representing a single Game URL, with its own invitation link, players list, settings, etc… ) each linked to a specific Foundry World within your installation. This basically allows you to launch straight into a world and to switch from one world to the other by simply going to the right URL, with no need to return back to setup.
Along with the Bazaar UI released recently, there’s actually no need for the Foundry setup page. I originally planned on keeping it available and usable as a hub to launch into your different URLs, but that turned out to be a headache to do it without adding massive confusion to the users, so I had to drop it.

The User Manager release that followed basically takes care of deprecating the /join and /players pages from Foundry. You will never have to login again into your games, since your Forge login already identifies who you are. The User Manager depends on the Game Manager, so you can only access it after enabling that feature, since it works on a per-game basis. It also requires the game privacy mode to be set to Private for obvious reasons. Now, with both those features enabled, you will enter the game URL and start straight into your world, already logged in, and for those who are GM-ing multiple groups per week, you don’t need to switch from one world to the other based on which players you expect to want to access their sheets. You can now also entirely configure your players from The Forge site itself, customizing a player’s nickname or their role.

With the User Manager, you can also, as GM, quickly switch from one account to another within Foundry, allowing you to impersonate your players to see what they would see if they logged in. It also lets you create a temporary player user very easily.

After the release of the User Manager, I’ve found one major issue that I hadn’t anticipated, if you want to enable the manager for a world in which you already have users, then those players will lose access to the actors and journal entries that were shared with them, as well as their custom macros and other settings. So another release followed which added the User Assignment feature to the manager, allowing you to assign your invited Forge Players to existing Foundry Users within a world. With this, your players will login into their existing users, and will have access to the same journals and actors you had shared with them, as well as retain ownership of their macros or drawings, and their custom macro hotbar configuration, etc…

That’s it for the Story Teller features. Those features are how I envisioned things to work from the start, over a year ago when I started the idea of The Forge, and it took this long to finally see that dream realized. I’m extremely happy with the results and with the features. I hope you are as well

Now, on to the next tasks! The roadmap said that I’d do an infrastructure revamp, followed by more Bazaar work. I’m not entirely sure, there is definitely a need for the infrastructure revamp, but I’ve been looking into it lately and I think I can delay that a little. I want to continue what I started with the Bazaar in the recent weeks. As some of you may have noticed, The Bazaar has a Premium modules section which gives access to the Foundry protected content from Warhammer, as well as a Forge exclusive Premium content where if you link your Patreon to your Account and you are a Patron at the correct tier for one of the Patreon creators that are available on the Bazaar (currently only supporting Miska’s Maps), then their premium content will be automatically unlocked.
After that release, I’ve been approached by a few people who are interested in doing similar things and so I’m bumping that in priority to basically finish the Bazaar UI and adding the purchasing section to it so that creators can sell you their premium content, as well as Assets for you to use in your games.

I will most probably also work on improving the infrastructure and continuing to slowly move my server backends to Kubernetes, so it’s more of a “I will do both tasks at the same time” rather than “I’m swapping their order”. But first, before I get to any of that, I will be taking the next couple of weeks off, so I can rest a little and breathe, and sleep.

That’s it for me today. Thanks everyone who have been extremely patient waiting for these features to become available. I hope it was worth the wait and it wasn’t disappointing in any way (if it was, feel free to reach out and give us feedback!).

See you next time, and happy rolling

[kakaroto]

Hi everyone again,

It’s been a while since the last update; nearly 4 months! And a lot has happened in all this time.
Other than needing to take a little break in December to avoid burning out, (only coming out of my pseudo-vacation to add the boxing week special event), we’ve also had a bit of a growth spurt in January with 4 people joining The Forge as consultants in various capacities, and a lot of time and effort went into the onboarding, and management of these new staff members and their tasks.
With the new year, there is also quite a lot of activity happening that related to paperwork, as there was a bit more structuring of The Forge, but there’s a lot of tasks relating to accounting, legal and incorporation. That has taken a big chunk out of the development time for January.

Fortunately, we’ve made great progress in small increments all throughout this time, and I’ve implemented some of those infrastructure changes that I had planned for in the previous roadmap. It’s not all finished, but there’s enough changes that I’m relatively happy with the results and I will continue to be making these small increments to improve the overall performance and setup of The Forge so your games remain performant even with the scaling up of our user base.

The other big milestone of course is the release of the Marketplace portion of the Bazaar. We’ve managed to time it perfectly so the ability to buy content was released on February 18th—the one year anniversary of the release of The Forge as a closed beta to my patrons. The only thing available with the release was the ability to buy gift cards so you can say thank you to your game master, which seemed appropriate for an anniversary release.
Since then, we’ve had many talented content creators join the marketplace and add their content, and it’s been a great success! Unfortunately, I couldn’t just say ‘released!’ and move on to the next task, because there was a lot more effort involved than I anticipated with regards to creating a good user experience for the creators as well. The onboarding of the creators, the development of their dashboard, and implementation of the payouts system has taken quite a bit of time during this month of March, but things seem to be fitting into place now, and there’s new content being released every day.

I hope you all enjoyed these latest changes, and are making full use of them. But there’s no rest for the wicked, so it’s time to look towards the future, and what’s next in store for you.

I’ve updated the first post in this thread with a more detailed long term roadmap, so you can refer to it directly. In the short term however, I want to concentrate on the awesome D&D Beyond integration that I’ve been planning for so many months now, as well as improving the overall polish of the Forge website and its features. Another really cool project that we’re moving towards is a partnership between The Forge and Demiplane so all of you looking for an LFG system within The Forge, there’s something in the pipeline and it’s coming hopefully soon

That’s it for now, I gotta get back to work! So much stuff to do!
KaKaRoTo