Projects' updates and a contest!

Hey everyone!

An update is long overdue considering how fast things have been changing lately. I do my best to keep everyone informed of what is going on with my various projects but I also try to avoid spamming you all with an email update every few days.

I'm trying to break my habit, so instead of starting with a long post, here are the cliff notes of what you need to know : 

• Welcome to all the new patrons! My patronage has exploded in the last few weeks, and I can finally let go of that financial pressure and anxiety I've had for the past few months, as I can pay all my bills now! Thank you all for your support, it means everything to me!
• The Forge is getting stable. I've added quite a few new features, and improved stability and performance, and I will do one more scheduled maintenance on Tuesday then I will add subscription support and get it ready for release for the end of the month (more details below).
• Beyond20 work is ongoing, I rewrote all of the extension into pure javascript, making it much easier to work with and I started working on digital dice support. It took all of last week, but now I can work on the new features and bugfixes and do a release soon-ish (more details below).
• The announcement is a call for help, I'd like The Forge users to share their best screenshots of Foundry so we can make a community provided collage of games, but also help us choose a new background image and default game banner. Let's make this a contest! Full contest details below.

Details :

• Let's start with Beyond20. I know that about half of my patrons are here thanks to Beyond20. You've all been instrumental in keeping me motivated to work on it and I thank you for that and for all the love and words of encouragement I've received in the past months. I've started streaming my development sessions whenever I work on Beyond20, you can see them on twitch, and the past 2 weeks (wow, it was a long and laborious endeavor!) were spent on porting Beyond20 to pure javascript code to make things easier for the long term support of the extension. You can see past videos here. I will now continue working on digital dice integration and other features and bug fixes. I should start my stream any minute now, so you can hop along and watch/comment/chat with me while I work on it : https://twitch.tv/KaKaRoToDM 
• The Forge : As you all know, Foundry's release date is set for May 22nd. That's a pretty tight deadline for me, but I really want to have the Forge released at the same time as Foundry, so I've decided to cut back on a lot of the features that I wanted to do and concentrate on stability and scalability. All of my planned features will still happen, they will just happen post-release. The service has had a lot of expansions lately and it's already grown to 7 different servers working together to keep everyone's games snappy. With that in mind, I need to do one more maintenance to improve the performance of the European server (the maintenance will be done for every user, regardless of their chosen region), though it shouldn't affect you as it will only happen if you've been inactive, it will be done one user at a time (so you're not affected while you're not the user being moved) and it should only take a few seconds per user. More details here. Once that's done, I will work on two things from now until release : adding payment processing/subscription selection system, and working on the actual site contents, like finally writing those terms of service, improving the front page content, adding a 'getting started' and an 'about' page, etc... By the way, has everyone seen this? :)

And here comes the announcement. We need your help!

My friend Zlatan (@zgrimshell on Discord) has volunteered to help me with improving the website content, and we want to connect more with our wonderful community. As part of an ongoing effort to make The Forge the best possible tool for your Foundry experience, we are working on improving the web presence to make it a breeze for people who want to enter the realms of stories, unforgettable experiences and joy of playing with your friends. 

Part of that improvement is having an image or even a GIF on our landing page that would show wonderfully crafted maps and gameplay, hopefully giving newcomers the A-Ha! moment! As proverbs says "a picture is worth a thousand words" - we are inviting you to share your in-game screenshots or crafted maps you would proudly present to the world and friends. Send your submissions on the Discord server or if you prefer email, send it to contact@forge-vtt.com and goblins will deliver them to us.

We will pick those with the highest initiative so cast your best work! :)

And to make things more interesting, I am making this a contest open to everyone. I will pick three winners from all submissions who will receive a full year of Game Master Tier subscription to The Forge. 

There are three categories (one winner per category), one for your game screenshots, one for helping us find a new background image for the website, and one for a new default game banner.

• Game screenshots. I want to show a few screenshots of people playing Foundry and having fun, maybe make that into a GIF, or a mosaic of screenshots, I'm not sure yet. All images are welcome, of all systems with any module/customization, with or without Audio/Video, playing your own homebrew games or official adventures, in combat or in theatre mode, or showing your note taking skills with a journal open. We're looking to show the diversity of gameplay and of Foundry's interface, so the more unique it is, the better. The chosen images will be made available on the website, so if you or your player's faces are visible (with Video conferencing enabled), make sure you get permission from everyone before sending the image. Multiple screenshots can be accepted and incorporated into the result, but only the best of the best will be chosen as contest winner.
• Background image. The Forge's background image is really not that great. It was chosen from the community wiki as a placeholder image back in August when I started designing the website, but then it stayed. I really want a new background image that is beautiful, fits well with the rest of the website design (in dark and light themes) and is attractive to RPG gamers. Send your own original work only. You will need to give us a non-exclusive perpetual license to use the image.
• Game banner. The game banner that is set by default is the only image I had on hand which I actually owned the copyright to, and it was a picture I took myself of my own table two years ago... while it's a beautiful setup, it's really quite an ugly default banner for people's games. Click here to see what it currently looks like. We want to see something that says "we play tabletop RPG games" without being specific to a single system or adventure, and would serve well as a default game banner for people's games. We may select more than one for use on the website, but only one will be chosen as contest winner. Send your own original work only. You will need to give us a non-exclusive perpetual license to use the image. 

Contest ends on May 21st at noon (12:00 PM EST), just in time to choose the winners, finalize the website and be ready for the release! :)

I can't wait to see what you all come up with! 

Thanks!

Youness.