Roadmap please
 

Here is a feature request for the forums: Could we please get an actively managed and published roadmap for LWD to show us what is in the works for Realm Works? What are the upcoming features and improvements that are actively in the pipeline? What are upgrades that are intended but might take awhile? What are some of the projected timelines? What are some often requested features that are just simply not going to be possible in the near term?

This could be a sticky forum post, a trello page we can be allowed to view, anything.

Just knowing that LWD is putting some love into the tool might just keep folks from jumping ship to other tools like World Anvil, etc.

Thank you.

+1

Even though we had this discussion several times, I am still strongly in favor of such a list. Especially since the promised updates became somewhat scarce.

Also, a list of what content is currently being prepped for the content market.

If you are reading this Rob. People. Are leaving to try other tools simply because of the lack of communication....

It's the day before GenCon starts. I doubt anyone at LWD will see this thread for at least a week.

Hi folks, my apologies for the late reply on this. Our most recent focus has been getting everything in place for the launch of Pathfinder 2nd Edition so we haven’t had a lot of time to focus on future road maps for Realm Works. Rest assured when we have more info to share we will be sure to post it on social media and share in our newsletter. Thanks for being patient!
If you do happen to be at GenCon this weekend, stop by the booth for a demo of some of the new features.

New features of Realm Works or HLO?

Oh, wow. I must have been super tired when I wrote that. I apologize. The demos are of Campaign Theater. I'm really sorry for the mistake. :D

TLDR;

Respectfully, LJ, one of the biggest beefs from the community of RW users is that LWD is spending so much time and effort with HLO that it feels like RW is stagnating. Features promised many years ago have not come to fruition (for one example, the player web view teaser video was published 4.5 years ago). Your comment above kind of emphasizes that, as apparently GenCon isn't going to feature anything new for RW. It is concerning, quite frankly, that it seems like one small team is working on all of the projects at LWD rather than having a team focused on each major project. HLO and RW seem like vastly different animals where work on one should not slow down work on the other. I know that LWD is a small company, and that gets thrown out in defense of LWD every time these conversations pop up, but that excuse can't fly for much longer.

If HLO is going to be the cash cow that gets LWD the ability to start hiring enough staff to actually work on RW again, even that would be considered "some" news that we could at least digest with the hope that our product isn't going to the curb. Of course, the Content Market was presented as being that income source, but I don't think we have heard anything on that front, either, since launch. (If we have, please point me there. I don't spend that much time slogging though all of these forums.)

You have to understand that there are many of us who have invested hundreds and hundreds of hours, each, to make RW the tool we need at our game table. But a lot of that time was done on good faith that the tool would continue to evolve and get better. Frankly, RW is THE most powerful tool on the market for what it does, but it still has so many little imperfections and quirks and there are other newer shinier products out there that actually seem to have active ongoing product development and signs that the developers actually respond to their users desires.

One of the reasons I personally started this thread is that every time I sit down to use RW, I find that I am fighting those little imperfections that others seem to be doing better. Custom Calendars? competitors have those. Web view for players? Other tools are designed from the ground up with that built in. So I keep looking for something to grab hold of that will keep me using RW. I don't want to scrap the hundreds of hours I have spent inputting my campaign world into this tool, but if it isn't evolving with the times and getting better, if features that were promised are still years off, well....

Rob and company need to realize that letting us know the truth, rather than nothing at all, would still improve retention of customers by a huge factor. I personally would probably stop looking at all the shiny alternatives out there if there was any inkling that RW was being actively worked on, at all. But I see no evidence of that. A stray forum post every few months with all the reasons why nothing has happened is not good enough. There was a flurry of activity surrounding the Content Market, but now what?

Help us out here, LJ. Please provide some transparency as to what LWD is really doing with our beloved RealmWorks. Please help us by being proactive with your customer relationships, rather than reactive. The newsletters are not good enough. Take some lessons from companies like DnDBeyond or Arkenforge, who publish roadmaps and trello pages to keep their user base in the loop on what is coming, and what is further off, and what is simply not on the table.

As someone who has been actively looking at other tools, I can tell you that their forums and user groups are FULL of people who have given up on RW for the very reasons I mention above. I truly do not wish to join their ranks. I just desperately want RW to fulfill the needs it promised to fill. I want to love it again.

Rant over.

Let me second Conandy and add my perspective.

I posted my feature request list back in November 2018 and in the next couple of months several items, clearly low hanging fruit, were done which was gratifying as every one of those mattered to people.

But after that flurry of updates? Nothing. We got 64 bit (RW is so much better and easier to use now) and we got a small features as LWD rolled out various updates to make the CM work. The CM launched (and it wasn't very good tbh) and besides some fixes for individual users with issues we've gotten nothing since, not even new content to buy.

I use RW every week for my two campaigns and I have a ton of time and effort invested in it. That doesn't mean I'll stay forever as new campaign managers come out, with close enough feature sets and active development ongoing.

People are also actively developing new tools to rival Realm Works. If you don't want to lose existing customers, you have to communicate. If you want to attract new customers, you have to communicate. If you want to stay ahead of your competition, you have to have a roadmap. And if you want to show people how and why you're better than your competition, you have to share that roadmap.

Yes to what @Conandy said, for the most part.

My own experience has been that I only check back every six months to a year to see any updates. Part of the problem was expectations but my own realization of my style. In the end, I need something that lets me put in ideas and notes as I'm gaming, not a system that seems to require all data entered into it and during a session, I just click to reveal things.

64bit helped and it's faster. It's still not at a level where pen and paper is faster for me. It might never be? I don't know. or it needs a whole new area for notes that I can type as I game, like a scratch pad, to put someplace later? Or the ability to record and convert to text? Or something?

I used to put data into it but don't even do that, and I do find that sad. That's where I'm at. I do think that RW was intended for a certain type of DM or to be used in a certain way and it hasn't ever come together for me. :(

The use case for RW is very much "enter all the data first and between sessions", rather than as a note-taking tool during sessions.

Yeah, I know. I was just so excited for it when I first started using it. Probably because it's not how I typically prep or DM, it was showing me a lot of new ways to make connections and connect story points better. So, I appreciated and really liked that! But I still do a fair amount of reacting to what happens at the table, and RW just can't "keep up" so to speak with that style.

I think I was also really excited for the content market to have a lot of little one shot freebies, like an Inn or other buildings, including something that I could contribute to, over time but it seems like that's not the case, either. Or it's just that extra step of work.

Ah, well.

Note taking is something I do at the table all the time. I just keep a text editor, I use textpad but I'm sure even notepad would be fine, open. I jot down a whole series of notes about stuff in the play session there and then the first chance I get I input all of that into RW. It works really well.

Considering all the benefits to session prep and helping me build an interconnected game world I can deal with a two step note taking process.

I must be the exception. I've made my own game session category, separate from the provided tool. Each session I make a new topic, and order them with a prefix. I record which characters were there, the real world date of the session, and the (numerical) start and end in-game days. Then I take notes in snippets during the session, and I can choose if the notes are player info or DM info. It's all linked, so I can easily find a record of interactions with an NPC or when an item was found, etc.

Since I run a sandbox without a pre-scripted story, I may be an atypical RW user. But it's fantastic for a game heavy on faction interaction and where the past sessions influence the next.

EDIT to continue the conversation of the OP: I've got enough history and work inputting this world into RW that I won't be switching from RW as long as I'm DMing this world... unless some competitor put out an import feature. But all bets are off if I started a different world due to concerns expressed already in this thread.
I had hoped that the CM would provide income that would support RW development, and I fully expected there to be a quiet period after the CM release. I've even purchased a few CM items even though my world is nearly completely homebrewed, mostly with non-standard monsters and such, to support RW. I can also understand that Lonewolf's user base is largely Pathfinder and so a big development like PF2 (really not long after Starfinder too) would cause some shifting of resources. But with PF2 out, I'd have assumed that LW would have received previews and been working on PF2 before the launch so that with launch resources could go back to other things.
So, yeah: throw us a bone cuz we're going hungry. The dogs might start sniffing around another doorstep.

When I was GMing, I used to use the "game session" section to add brief notes of what happened during the game session. It recorded the start and end in-game dates (I think).

BJ made some rather sobbering comments on FB which boil down to Pathfinder 2 is too important for us, so we currently cannot afford to invest any work effort into RW.


:(

From BJ

Same here. I log sessions both for the players reference and my own with a custom made topic category.

Surprise? PF2's release date was announced over a year ago.

Who wants to join forces and buy the IP for RW from LWD so we can turn it into the game changer it should be? Since it apparently isn't a money maker, we should be able to purchase it cheap.

The dev license cost for DevExpress might be expensive.

Sounds like an idea, even though I am no software dev.

The problem is, there will always be enough to work on for their "money making" software that RW will get minimal (if any) time. Look at the history of HLC and PF1 - Paizo cranks out new material at such a rapid pace that LoneWolf struggled to "fully implement" many of the rules, because they were so busy partially implementing every new book that came out.

The Content Market was supposed to be the way RW makes money, but with such a limited selection it ain't gonna make much...

They may have been surprised by the Playtest announcement just like we were, about four months before Gen Con 2018. Between then and the holiday/end of year break they'd be focused on implementing and keeping up with the Playtest rules. There'd be a pause at the start of 2019, perhaps just enough time to finally launch the Content Market, and then full-bore on PF2 again once Paizo had the rules finalized.

Even if LWD got word before the announcement, it probably wouldn't have been too much earlier.

I doubt they'd sell (it seems like a passion project for Rob) but you never know.

Their website says the base cost is between $1,000 and $2,200 per year per developer on the project.

Exactly.

I fully understand the need to make money and to prioritize accordingly. But, in my humble opinion, there will always be enough Paizo related work around to have an excuse to neglect RW proper. as well as other potential products for the Content Market.
And, I for one do not play Pathfinder, which means, I will not spend money on it.

Besides, we were promised regular updates, even if there was more or less nothing to report.



Maybe it is time for another Kickstarter to collect funds to pay for another dev, who can focus on RW and RW alone.

So much for the previously solid and constant assurances of nothing being slowed down because of separate teams.

My apologies for the confusion! The promise of regular weekly updates even when we had nothing to report was for the completion of the Kickstarter and getting the Content Market out, not for the remaining life of the product. I absolutely will continue to give updates when we have new items relating to the product to share and am excited to continue to do so. The best place to look for those is in our newsletter and various other locations where we communicate, such as here or social media.

As much as we would love to hire on a new dev to replace those we've lost, it's unlikely we will do another Kickstarter for RW anytime in the near future, too many things can potentially go wrong and we don't want to put that on our consumers.

That was our promise to KS backers as we pushed to complete the Content Market for our KS obligations, which we've completed. I also promised the truth, I sadly can't always make that truth what everyone hopes it to be. Currently, we are focused on the future health and longevity of our business as a whole. While I do understand that may not be what you would wish, it is the path we as a company must take to ensure future support for all our products, Realm Works included.


A dedicated section just for in game note taking sounds great! I'll add it to our list of potential ideas.

Rob and I both agree that small items in the Content Market such as buildings, inns, and one-shot dungeons would be a great addition. We have a few ideas on how to make this happen once we get back on that track.


We are still supporting Realm Works and have every intention of continuing to do so. Once things calm down, we hope to be able to assign people back to working on Realm Works full time again. The only thing close we have to a roadmap at this juncture is the intention to eventually add newer systems to the program and exterminate the bugs scampering around inside.

Just don't shut down the product at least for the next decade and I will be fine.
If you are going to make paid upgrade to refresh the UI or do some major improvement - you will get my money.

It's a shame that there's no new features waiting on the roadmap too.

Especially since there are promised features still unfinished, some of them advertised during the Kickstarter as "almost finished"....

If the content market flopped just switch to paid upgrades. I believe it would work. Surely a few supporters would jump ship, since they have been promised by kickstarter some stuff. But yeah, let's face it if the feature isn't ready I dont know how many years later it was not accomplished, buried and requires dev time. And you guys have to eat as well. :)

I suggested basically this a long time ago and was told the design didn't allow it.

After they spent years trying to attract customers who were never going to come, GM's who only use modules are going to buy RW and the CM why?, maybe they'll put the time in to allow modules to be added as the user wants/buys.

Sadly I am one of those.

As I generally only play published adventures (ok, I started building my own homebrew campaign, but just gave up - I dont have the time to devote to it, between playing and DMing in 4 games a fortnight) , the shiny buttons of new actively developed toolsets such World Anvil and Arkenforge are calling me.

I will still have RW for any campaign type stuff... but for individual sessons and as those systems get more and more features like RW (really its only autolinking that holds me back).. I'll find that I'll use RW less and less.

I havent given up hope yet... but what I want from a toolset is changing.

Of course there are! However, since I don't know at this juncture which ones will be practical and which ones won't, I wouldn't want to get anyone excited only to have to remove them. Once we have the time and resources to thoroughly investigate the incredibly long list of ideas and requests we have I can put together something more informative. :)

That's where a Scrum-style agile approach helps. Forget about the thorough analysis of everything and prioritise some easy stuff while slowing working through prioritising/breaking down the more complicated stuff.

This is also a great way to get developers who aren't familiar with the code base up to speed. Give them easily accomplished tasks that require them to get to know the code to do. It might take them the whole sprint to do what an experienced dev could do in an afternoon but the investments in time over a few sprints serves to get them familiar with at least chunks of the code and how the whole hooks together.

Good thoughts Farling and kbs, I'll pass those along to the higher ups.