Launch Update!

Hi folks,

We’re excited to have everyone join us on this journey to build Owlbear.

You’re likely wondering how this is all going to work! Don’t worry, I’ll explain.

If you didn’t see the update from yesterday, you should be receiving an email later tonight (between 6-8PM EST) including a beta-key and a link to the builder.

This update is a super long one, but I hope you take the time to skim through it. First, we’ll go through a brief tutorial of how to use the app when you get it, how you can give feedback to the Owlbear team, and finally what to expect from us after the release.

Beta Keys and Account Creation

Later tonight, you’ll receive an email from our team with a beta key and a URL to access the builder. To create an account all you’ll need to do is click the URL, complete your profile information, and enter your beta key. Once this is done, you’ll have full access to the app.

If you’re interested in learning more about how the app/builder works, keep reading. Otherwise, you can wait until launch and revisit this post as you walk through the steps yourself.

Getting Started with Owlbear

When you first log in (after you’ve set up your account + entered your beta key), you’ll land on the app’s dashboard. You’ll see a lot of changes to this dashboard over the upcoming months as we populate it with relevant information, resources, and new features. At launch, it’s simply a place another place for us to post updates for you all to see.

To build your first map, you’ll need to go to “Library” where all your maps will be stored. There will be a button that says “Add Map” that you can click to add a new map. You’ll be prompted to name your map and there is an optional field to give a written description of the map. Name the map and click “Create” to open up the blank map in the builder.

Getting familiar with the builder

To start it may seem like there’s a lot to learn, however, Owlbear has been designed to be as simple to use as possible. There are four main areas that you need to worry about: 1) the toolbar, 2) the tool panel, 3) the selection/options panel, and 4) the side menu.

Main Toolbar

First, the main toolbar is located at the top of the screen in the middle, with your basic app functionality like panning, undo/redo, saving, and layer controls.

Main Panel

Second, we’ve got the main panel where the majority of the builder’s functionality can be found. Within the panel we’ve got two main categories of tools in the builder at launch: Build Tools and Decorate Tools. You can access these tools in the bottom left-hand corner of the builder (click the hammer icon).

Build tools include all tools that involve structural elements within a builder. This includes the walls, the floors, the stairs, the doors and windows, and the fireplaces. You’re likely to see more tools added over time (e.g., roof tool).

Decorate Tools include all tools that decorating the structure you’ve built. At launch, this will only be the object tool, however, we will be adding a lighting tool here eventually (still in testing phase). When you go furnish your building, you’re going to want to have the object tool active.

Wall Tool

Once active, the wall tool allows you to select a wall style and place walls onto the map canvas. To start placing a wall simply click on the map where you want the wall to start – there will be an orange dot showing your cursor (note: you must have a wall style active for it to place anything). The wall tool is snap-to-grid, so once you’ve clicked the first time you can move your mouse and click a second time to place a second point. You can continue this process until you commit the walls construction by either looping back to the original starting point (e.g., a square) or right-clicking.

At launch the wall tool has our auto-connection feature disabled. The autoconnection would allow you to continue walls from existing points and merge overlapping walls in an intelligent way. We are still bug testing this and did not feel confident enough to include it at launch. However, we’ll be adding it back in post-launch.

Floor Tool

Once active, the floor tool allows you to select a floor style and place floors onto the map canvas. There are two modes that you can choose from: 1) rectangle mode or 2) pen mode.

If you have rectangle mode active, you need to click and drag (while holding the mouse button down) to draw a rectangle. When you release your mouse button the floor will commit to the rectangle that’s been drawn.

If you have pen mode active, you follow the same logic as the wall tool but instead of a wall being placed along the path drawn, the polygon within the path drawn is filled with flooring.

Door/Window Tool

The door/window tool allows you to select a door or window style and place them onto an existing wall within the map canvas. With the door/window tool active, you’ll see a red or green dot when you cursor over an existing wall. When this dot is green, you can click to place a door or window. When it’s red, you do not have enough room to place the door or window style that’s active.

Delete Tool

The delete tool allows you to delete walls, floors, and doors and windows that have been placed on the map. When active, you can hover over any of these structural elements and click to delete (there will be an orange highlight over what the delete tool is targeting when you hover).

When deleting walls, you can hold down CTRL to delete all of the segments the wall you’re targeted is connected to. This is helpful if you have a long wall with multiple segments that you want to get rid of quickly.

If you delete a door or window, the builder will automatically redraw the walls they were placed on to fill in the hole.

Object Tool

The object tool allows you to select an object style and place that object onto the map canvas. When active, you will see the object you’re about to place with an orange bounding box around it. Click once to place the object onto the map. You can rotate the object before placing with your scroll wheel or resize the object by holding down CTRL and using your scroll wheel.

Note, to select an object that is already placed on the map, you must have the Select Tool active.

Select Tool

The select tool allows you to select an object that is already placed on the map and change its position, rotation, and size using the same logic as the object tool. You can delete an object that is selected by pressing the “Backspace” key.

You can select multiple objects at once by clicking and dragging your mouse over multiple objects and releasing.

Export Tool

The export tool allows you to export your entire map, including all layers. When you click export, you should automatically start downloading a ZIP file that includes a folder called “Layers”. Inside this folder you will see a PNG of each layer in your map.

At release, there are no custom export settings, however, we plan to add them in the future.

Selections/Options Panel

Third, we have the selections panel directly to the right of the tool panel on the bottom of the builder’s UI. This panel gives you additional functionality based on the tool you have active including selecting styles and editing settings on individual objects. Each tool uses the selections/options panel differently:

· Wall Tool, Floor Tool, Door/Window Tool, Stair Tool, and Object Tool all use the selection/options panel to display the styles you can choose from. There are tabs at the top of the panel that organize the existing styles into groups for easier navigation (e.g., furniture).

· Select Tool uses the selection/options panel to display specific settings to the object that you have selected.

Side Menu

On the upper righthand side of the screen you’ll see a hamburger that opens up a side menu. While we continue to develop the app, this side menu will likely be a catch all for app settings such as the grid and object shadows.

What’s coming after the release?

To keep you guys in the loop of our development plans, I’ve put together a few notes covering updates over the next week to a few months out.

Week #1 Patch Note

We have a list of identified bugs that were not able to be squashed before release (and anticipate a few unknown bugs to surface once all of you folks are onboarded). Because of this, we’ll have a patch deployed a week after release to ensure all things remain stable.

If you do run into any bugs/issues when using the builder, please take note and let us know. We’ll have a list of all known bugs somewhere for everyone to reference in case you’re running into an issue others have also run into.

There will be no new features added within this patch. We do however have a list of features/improvements that we’ll be moving to as soon as this patch is out (see below for specifics).

Initial List of Features/Quality of Life Improvements

Note, some of these updates will be small and released over the next few weeks, however, some are far bigger and may extend out into the year.

· Tile color variants will be collapsed into one tile on the selection panel, minimizing the number of tiles you see. You’ll then be able to click a tile and select from a drop-down what specific color/variant you’d like to have active. This will also add the ability to update the style of an object that is already placed onto a map (currently not possible).

· Adding the ability to change the canvas size on the map builder, so that users are not limited to a square/12x12 grid.

· Advanced grid settings, including 1/10th and ½ grids to allow more flexibility/better placement of objects with specific tools.

· Improvements with the wall tool, specifically a smart auto-join feature that is still going through some testing/bug fixes before we can confidently release it.

· Improvements with the stair tool, so that you can place a single stair tile and set how many flights up or down you’d like it to go. This will make placing/aligning floors across multiple layers significantly easier.

· We have a dynamic lighting tool that is currently under development but did not make release. We’ll continue testing and refining the tool before including it in one of our bigger updates.

· Advanced export options including backgrounds, grid options, and VTT exports (e.g., Foundry VTT)

· Adding the ability for users to start a new map from a templated building (we currently have 20 prefabricated buildings ready to go)

· Adding a roof tool that allows users to build complex roof structures without much effort.

· Adding a chimney tool that allows users to place a fireplace and scale chimneys up to the top levels of a building (similar to how the stair tool logic will work, making placement/alignment far easier)

· Adding a map marketplace where users can publish their creations to share with other Owlbear users (long-term, but we’re super excited about this idea)

· Adding a tile editor to enable users to create their own variants of tiles to use in the map editor (long-term)