Thank you all!

Hi everybody!

While I don't celebrate Thanksgiving (it was in October over here in Canada), this week is still a time to be thankful and so, I wanted to thank every one of you for your continued support and love. It really means the world to me to see so many of you show your support and generosity to a developer like me.

I also wanted to do a little status update on my projects, as I'm mostly silent and I know some of you would like to know more about where things are at. I will later do a more thorough "State of KaKaRoTo" like I did last year (though likely not as thorough 😁).

Before we get to the status updates, I do have two announcements to make. First, I'll be attending PAX Unplugged in Philadelphia (December 10th-12th), so if any of you are going to be attending PAXU, or are in the area, let me know in the comments below and we'll try and do something! I'm mostly going to meet people in this amazing community, so I'd be happy to meet up!

The second announcement is that we just launched our Black Friday Sale on the Forge! With 10% off your subscription, you can get a subscription for as low as 3.59$ a month, which is crazy inexpensive, and way underpriced for the amazing value that the Forge provides! If you're already subscribed to the Forge, you can get the 10% discount to apply if you do a subscription upgrade, and if you're on a monthly sub, it's the perfect time to upgrade to yearly (since the discount applies once, so to get the reduced price for the whole year, you'd need to be subbed yearly).

Now, on to a short status update:

Beyond20

Beyond20 has been quite stable so far, we haven't had much activity in the issue tracker, everything is still running smoothly and there's no new bugs being reported. It's hard to believe that it's already been 2 months since the last release! I've worked last week on re-adding the support for the native Foundry rolls, which I got working with a new system (which hopefully works better now) and made it compatible with Foundry 0.8.x, though there are still some issues in how the sheet is updated, so more debugging needs to be done before it's ready, but once it is, I'll push an update to the companion module itself. I've also started scoping out what kind of cool new features to work on for the next release. I think I'll add some more customization capabilities and more advanced hotkeys since that seemed to be a quite popular feature! I will attempt to release the next version before the PAXU event, but if I miss that deadline, it will likely have to wait until after the holidays.

D&D Beyond Integration

I've unfortunately not made a lot of progress on that front, which I'm quite sad about. It is however my next big priority (though it has been for a few months now, I've had some out-of-nowhere super-urgent things to deal with constantly). I expect to be making some more good progress on this within the next few weeks, with hopefully a major update sometime next month or early 2022.

The Forge

This is where most of my energy goes, as you well know, and there's been a ton of progress on that front. I don't know if you all follow my regular dev update streams, but those are the best way to get regular status updates on everything that's been happening on the Forge. One of the coolest features I was so stoked to announce recently is the new Save Points feature (coming early 2022 to a Forge near you). Check out this clip from my last stream in which I demo it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9hmiFucJ00 

With the development team growing, I expect we'll have a faster development pace, since the administrative tasks had started taking most of my time (especially the US sales tax recently has been a nightmare), but now I'm shifting to more project management and development, and getting the team up to speed. 

With the Black Friday sale this weekend, we've also released a new revamped subscription manager UI which is so much better and easier to use than the previous one. I'm very happy about that. We're also working on implementing our own image optimizer and manipulation API for the assets library with a release coming soon. 

KaKaRoTo

Ok, I'm not a "project", but taking care of myself has been a big subject for me in 2021 and I did say last time that my health was going to be one of my priorities. I think I still have a lot of work to do on that department, but I've also improved quite a bit already when comparing to 2020. I still overwork myself all the time, I still feel the exhaustion, but I do rest on the weekends at least, and I try to balance my work/life a bit better. I plan on taking some vacation time in December which I think will do me some good.

That's it! There's of course a lot more to say, but I promised I'd keep it short, so there you go 😀

I hope to see many of you at PAXU, it sounds like it's already going to be an amazing event, with some of the Foundry team there, as well as my friends from The League of Foundry VTT Developers and of course, The Forge's team (me and Leon). 

Until next time!

KaKaRoTo