2022 summary and 2023 plans (Patreon)

Hi everybody!

Maybe I'm a bit late with the summary for 2022, but I gave myself 3 weeks off from the social media and map making stuff. Anyway, Nov and Dec were quite intensive and fruitful especially with some new maps around the winter theme and other-than-generic fantasy styles :)

It was a year of continuation and stabilizing. I was constantly searching for the better balance between quality of the maps and their size in MB. Opened a new channels of distributing my maps. It was also time of the biggest project I've taken so far - Descent into Avernus. And foremost I was learning more about the animation and options given me by the software I had. Finally we moved away form g-drive as I opened website, where I strongly believe it's easier to browse and get my maps without asking for access.

Quality / Size balance

Reading some of your feedback I learned some of my maps aren't playable due to huge size. They sometimes doesn't load in yours or your player's vtt. I want my maps to be accessible for everybody, not only for those with cutting edge hardware. Hence some of the maps were reworked to hit the golden balance with decent quality and size not exceeding 15 MB. The ideal is less than 10 MB for the WEBM format files.

Foundry VTT also allows me to work with the tiles, so some of the maps (like Giant Tortoise) are a collage of background and tiles layered over it. This ensures great quality with big maps.

New channel

It was at the beginning of 2022 and it seems so far in the past, but it's worth to mentioned, that all my maps for Foundry VTT (except official adventures) are also accessible and downloadable through Moulinette module.

What's Moulinette? It's Foundry VTT module allowing you to access the cloud storage, browsing assets and downloading them directly from in-game. Wonderful and easy tool. As of now I have 3.26DB of Foundry ready maps loaded there. 

Descent into Avernus

Continuing on re-creation of official maps I've started the big project of making DIA maps as animated. During the year I created all the maps from the first chapter. Honestly, it could be more, but I had some limited time to share between my original maps and DiA. Choosing between them I always prefer creating the original map as it gives me more creativity freedom :). No worries, DiA will be continued as long as OGL allows me to do it.

The website

Ok this is the big one this year because of two reasons: One is we don't need to care about g-drive and accesses. Given the timezones and the fact most of you live in US,  I had a hard time granting you the accesses to the maps on timely manner. Honestly sometimes I was waking up at 3am to share the folders - and I did it with pleasure, but still it was too hard for both sides :)

Second reason is more self-development side of a coin - It's my first website ever, I've never done it before. The website looks ok-ish and I know it's far from being super beautiful and super useful, but we'll get there.  

Plans for 2023

Shortly about the plans for this year.

Continuation:

• I plan to continue creating maps for Descent into Avernus, another chapter, maybe two.
• Developing the website - yes it needs to be better, the browsing is doable, but still far from what I think you deserve.

New:

• Creating new intro and branding: Looking for something more professional and nowadays looking.
• Going to start making maps in Unity Engine, eventually Unreal Engine 5 as I see the competition doesn't sleep :)

Those are the hard points I wish I could fulfil in 2023, there are couple of other ideas, but there are too much variables to commit and talk about them just now. :)

I wish you all a great 2023! May this year be wonderful and peaceful for you!

Cheers!

~dransky