Hello everyone. We hope that your February has been romantic with Valentines day. But most importantly, we hope you have stayed warm. We have a few things to share with this developer update.
If you'd like to watch back on the developer update stream, you will be able to view it here. Otherwise, read on!
Hiring announcements
We have four people joining the Forge team!
Corporat
Anthony, aka Corporat is a Foundry VTT module developer, and a member of the League of Foundry Developers. He has done a lot of work within the community, including porting OSE books to Foundry VTT. He's offering his services as a strategy consultant, and will help us with The Forge's business operations.
Wyrmsis
Tim, AKA Wyrmsis is a web developer with over a decade of experience, especially in the front end. He's developed many Foundry VTT modules, and contributes to the OSE system as well. We look forward to the many visual enhancements we know he'll be able to bring to our service!
MrFlowers
Rabih, AKA MrFlowers is a veteran web developer with experience wrangling complex processes into manageable UIs. He's also got extensive experience in database management, which we look forward to utilizing.
Targaryen
Cedric, AKA Targaryen is our newest DevOps engineer. He has a lot of experiencing managing a lot of complex server infrastructure, and will be dedicating his experience toward making our service even more seamless and straightforward than ever.
More interviews
We've published two interviews since our last developer update.
We interviewed Cody, former member of Foundry Gaming and long-time module developer. He had a lot of interesting insight to give on the development of the Foundry module developer community today.
Our other interviewee was Corporat, someone who now works with The Forge! Corporat has a lot of experience with both Foundry VTT development, and in the tabletop industry in general.
Both offer really interesting insights into their respective focuses, and we recommend checking them out!
Read their interviews here:
Ilijana Ivaniš
Ilijana Ivaniš
Happy (belated) Valentine's Day!
A happy belated Valentine's Day to our users. We hope that Valentine's Day was plenty romantic to everyone reading this.
If you weren't aware, The Forge held a writing contest for love letters written to RPGs, the game systems that have brought us all together. The winner of this contest wins a $50 gift card to The Forge, and a romantic 5e adventure- Cupid's Valentine Vendetta - A Humperdink's Wares Adventure.
The winner has been chosen! Congratulations to /u/AshleyMayWrites on Reddit, who's winning submission can be found here.
Bits of Polish
We've made numerous little bits of polish improvements to the website since February. These include:
- Display of the main page is better and faster, with the use of skeleton games.
- The Bazaar loads incredibly fast now- take a look! It should be much easier to install modules or systems going forward.
- We’ve improved shared compendiums generated by The Forge for V11.
- Along with a bunch of other various and minor bug fixes on The Forge.
Bazaar Showcase
We showcased the following packages for our Bazaar showcase:
- Emotional Lift by McRoMusic: https://forge-vtt.com/bazaar/package/mcromusic-emotional-lift
- Dark Streets Rooftops by 2D Storyteller: https://forge-vtt.com/bazaar/package/ds_rooftop
- Untethered Mountains by Mark Drummond J: https://forge-vtt.com/bazaar#package=markdrummondj-untethered-mountains
- And a free module: Narrator Tools by Elizeuangelo: https://forge-vtt.com/bazaar/package/narrator-tools
Beyond Integration going open source
Our Beyond Integration launched ambitiously, and has been out for a while now. We developed this with the cooperation of Mr. Primate, who helped us get started with the D&D Beyond metadata project. It's been going for a long time, and we've made a lot of progress.
However, we haven't been able to dedicate as much time as we would have liked to this project, and it requires a bit more work- it's still technically in beta. Until now, it could be accessed by subscribing to KaKaRoTo's Patreon. Going forward, we will be releasing the project into the open source space, and relaxing the import functionality for all Forge users. Anyone will be able to use it, as long as you own the content on D&D Beyond and have available storage.
These changes will not be immediate, and will take place over the next few weeks. We hope Forge users will get a lot of use out of this more open import functionality.
R20 Converter going open source
Users coming from Roll20 have often used KaKaRoTo's R20 Converter tool to import their campaigns from Roll20 into a Foundry-compatible format. Much like the D&D Beyond converter, it's helped many people bring pre-existing content that they've owned/made into Foundry VTT.
And just like the D&D Beyond converter, it is going open source! We'll announce further details in the coming weeks, but we hope this'll help more people migrating from Roll20 to Foundry VTT.
GAMA Expo
The Forge is heading to GAMA Expo 2024 in Louisville, KY this year. If you're at the convention, feel free to reach out and say hi!
And...
That's it for this developer update. If you want to follow us for regular updates, here are our social media links: