Development Update - August 2023

Hey everyone, I hope the summer is treating you well. This month, I wanted to take a break from large, complicated features that required a lot of refactoring, and focus on some smaller tasks that I've been meaning to do for a while. These are:

Accessibility improvements

I got some feedback a while ago that Fantasy Town Generator was very difficult to use with a screen reader - there were issues with poorly labeled buttons, general site landmarking, and probably most importantly - you couldn't interact with buildings on the map with a screen reader. This also basically stops you from interacting with people. I took some time this month to try and improve this. I added aria-labels where they were missing, added landmarks and more semantic html, and I've also added a new building list and search view. You can find that in the 'Buildings' section of a settlement. Any feedback in this area would be appreciated.

Update the population in the 'Your settlements' list when the settlement population changes

One area that's caused a lot of confusion in FTG since I first released it years ago, is that the population of a settlement in the 'Your settlements' list is actually the population of the settlement when it was generated, not the current population. This was done initially as the settlement lists and the settlements themselves are stored in two different places, so keeping them in sync isn't trivial. Also, it used to be pretty difficult to change the population by a lot, so it would usually be close. Now that district re-rolling is a thing, it's very easy to make a settlement much larger.

To avoid updating both data stores when a settlement changes, I've changed the UI to show the settlement classification in the 'Your settlements' list. But, this now updates with the settlement! 

Search for notes

Now when you search for either buildings or people, you can search by the presence of notes with 'note', or search the by contents of the notes themselves.

Bulk edits of people

You can now edit multiple people at once (with a smaller set of options than the normal edit person controls). This can be accessed from the 'Population' view.

Confirm cancel edit layout

When you edit the settlement layout, and you press cancel, there is now a pop-up confirming you want to cancel the changes. Hopefully this will prevent you from accidentally losing all your changes.

Conclusion

Well, that's it for this month! As always, thank you all so much for your support - you truly make this possible. If you have any feedback or questions, let me know, or message in the discord! What do you want to see next? My next big goal is larger settlements. There are two main things preventing that from being enabled today - the speed of generation, and the size of the generated settlements. I have some ideas on how to potentially tackle these, some which have additional benefits as well. I'm not sure how long this will take, so watch this space.