LegendKeeper in 2020

Over a year ago, I posted this GIF on a subreddit called /r/worldbuilding. At the time, I had been working on a little hobby project called LegendKeeper. I figured, hey, maybe other people will think this cool, too.

An hour later, a friend texts me, saying they saw LegendKeeper on the front page of Reddit. My phone starts lighting up as over half a million people descend upon that post, leaving excited comments and outpouring waves and waves of support. I knew at that point I had made something that people wanted to use.  As a software developer, this is one of the most gratifying feelings in the world.

So I got to work. Six months later, I launched the LegendKeeper closed beta. Since launch, over 4,000 LegendKeeper users have:

• Written 250,000+ articles
• Uploaded 500GB+ of maps
• Dropped 100,000+ pins
• Invited ~1,500 of their friends 

In that time, LK has changed dramatically, adding:

• A product and design expert (woo Justin!)
• A granular access control system
• Realtime updates
• A customizable shortcuts/category system
• A fully-custom drag and drop interface 
• A pin editor with over 16,000 possible combinations
• Secret blocks
• Table of Contents and Index blocks
• An automatic linker that scans documents and creates links for you

LK has been a nights and weekends thing for a while now. Sometimes this can be really frustrating; I have all this energy that I want pour into it, and only a few precious hours throughout the week. The community has been really supportive given these constraints, and I wouldn't have been able to iterate this quickly without your support and feedback.

Thank you for an awesome 2019! 2020 will be a big year for LegendKeeper. Our main focus now is launching public beta, which means we're working on:

• Activity feed, to increase transparency in your world. No collaborative application is complete without a thorough log.
• Smoothing out the permission system. The permission system is powerful, but not "production-grade user-friendly" yet.
• A  UI polish pass: this means CSS tweaks, little changes here and there to make the UI easier to consume and more visually harmonious.
• A real homepage lander and online presence.

After that, it's public beta time. Once beta is launched, we'll be looking forward to new features, such as customizable sidebars (think Wikipedia infoboxes but cooler), an enhanced atlas with multi-layer controls and fog of war, a timeline view, and a relationship manager and network view. 

New features are exciting, but we are committed to LegendKeeper being an overall polished and pleasing experience. Every feature we add has to earn its place and integrate well with the overall vision; we generally don't want to just slap a bunch of features together. Being this intentional and deliberate is obviously a little slower, but we think it's worth it to make a great product. We appreciate your patience!

Thank you again for all your support and positivity this year. All I ask is that you keep it up, and spread the word about LK! The more people that support it, the more time and resources I can dedicate to development. I'm only able to put about 20% of my personal capacity into LK at this point: Imagine what we could do with 100%!

2020 will be the Year of LegendKeeper!

Thanks again, 

Braden

P.S.

I started recording the song for the music video.