Kickstarter

It's high time for an update on Wild Card Creator development! First, I'd like to show you a bit of what I've been working on lately.

Homebrewing is an important part of Savage Worlds (I've created two homebrew settings myself), and one of my big priorities is to have Wild Card Creator support homebrewing material from the get go. Also, I think it's very important for the process of homebrewing material to be as easy as possible, and not something that requires mucking around with markup language. Instead, you'll be able to homebrew content like this:

Simple, graphical, and easy to understand. The idea is to make it so that you can create your own material in the same way that you would write it down on paper in a homebrew document.

You'll notice that the bottom part is labeled "mechanical effects". This is for identifying how the Edge or other character content affects the character mechanically. You'll note that this is a change from what I had been planning for a text parser that can interpret the meaning of a description. Despite a lot of effort, this parser I have developed has been consistently at about the 90% accuracy mark and, although it's good, it's not to my satisfaction. Improving it beyond that has taken a lot of time that is better spent on making more important features work in order to get Wild Card Creator released to you sooner. This also means that I have changed the way that character content is imported; it is now "unlocked" rather than truly parsed.

To make sure that there's no misunderstanding, I'd like to reiterate that Wild Card Creator will still import supplemental PDFs and will still let you add homebrew content. It just isn't going to be smart enough to automatically determine the meaning of Edges and such; you have to tell it what it means (and I'll be telling Wild Card Creator how all published settings are supposed to behave). This change is somewhat late in the game, but it certainly hasn't been a waste of time because having a parser that has about 90% accuracy means that I can add support for published settings more quickly. And at some point I believe that I can improve the parser to a point that I believe it's ready for users to use to interpret any Edge you write a description for; it's just not going to happen during the initial release.

There is a bit of bad news. One of the stretch goals for Wild Card Creator was to be able to make the program "skinnable" with themes that are reminiscent of many of the Savage Worlds books. Unfortunately, my attempts to make this happen haven't produced results that I am happy with. Furthermore, this is something that I've realized is rather a gray area with Mac OS X and iOS because Apple requires all products sold through their official app stores to have a look and feel that matches that of default programs for the operating system. So unfortunately, this is not going to happen and I'm working on something better that will be able to replace this stretch goal.

Now that that's out of the way, on to some fantastic news! The backer only beta will be released to you all this month! It will be feature complete and will allow you to:

• Create and save characters
• Access all material from Savage Worlds Deluxe
• Import a number of additional settings, including the Super Powers Companion/Necessary Evil
• Add your own homebrew content using a simple, powerful graphical interface
• Export characters in RTF, Plain Text, HTML, BBCode, Wiki Markup, Form-fillable PDFs, and Customized XML character sheets

I'll be providing you all with download instructions for the backer-only beta when it is ready. All backers will be able to download copies for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.

We're in the home stretch now! I hope that you're all as excited to use Wild Card Creator as I am to complete this and let you play around with it!

It's high time for a progress update to Wild Card Creator! Things are still right on track for a "plenty of time to make characters for Origins" release date, but I figured I'd give you a bit more information about where things are.

I recently shipped Beta 3 to testers. The big feature this time was character saving, which couldn't be completed until recently because the actual character contents hadn't been finalized. I fixed a couple dozen bugs reported in Beta 2 and now the bugs have become less prevalent. Beta 4 should be due out in about two weeks and will have some character exporting features in it, as well as several settings supported.

PDF importing is going very smoothly, although I'm discovering that every PDF seems to have at least one weird quirk that keeps it from being a breeze. Last night I was starting to support Hell on Earth Reloaded and found out that whenever I extracted text, all periods were bizarrely converted to the Unicode backspace character (basically, a text representation of when you type the backspace key, but without actually performing the backspace). Fortunately I've been able to figure out the problems like these and keep things going.

Some of you may be wondering about Savage Worlds Showdown support. As a huge fan myself, I would love to see a way to more easily make armies than the Excel spreadsheet. As the stretch goal states, support will be added after the initial release of Wild Card Creator. I'm debating right now whether or not to spin off Savage Worlds Showdown support into a standalone program, but either way it will be free for all backers. There will also be some nice interoperability, such as a "Convert to Showdown" option so you can convert a Savage Worlds character you made into a Savage Worlds Showdown character.

Oh, and I found a group of gamers to play Deadlands with. It's been a long time since I've had a chance to do that, so that's a huge help as it gives me a face to face gaming table that can test out Wild Card Creator.

Development of Wild Card Creator has been going much faster lately, now that much of the underlying work has been completed. I compare development of Wild Card Creator to building a pyramid: on the base levels you have to lay a lot of bricks and it doesn't look much like a pyramid. But the more you build and the higher up you go, the fewer bricks you have to place and it becomes more and more recognizably like a pyramid.

One way that this has become evident is the sort of things that beta testers have been reporting. At first it was bugs like "Wild Card Creator imports PDFs on Mac OS X and Linux, but not Windows", which was a big bug that was promptly fixed. Lately I've been getting more minor bug reports such as "the Elderly Hindrance doesn't add all the things it says it adds." Granted, there have still been a few large bugs, but overall the bugs have progressively been getting smaller and smaller, as well as less frequent.

Importing content from a PDF is probably 75% done. Deadlands Reloaded is fully supported (with the exception of two things: becoming Harrowed and the Supernatural Trait Edge), and since that's one of the most complicated settings out there, I'm finding that adding some of the lesser settings has been fairly trivial. It's almost to the point where if a setting doesn't add anything too different and they kept things in a straightforward layout format, I can get a setting fully supported in one sitting.

Currently I'm in the middle of implementing character saving. I had to make this one of the later things I did because I can't very well save a character if the way that a character is made isn't finalized. One thing I realized about saving a character is that you don't need to save all that much information. Basically, you just save the things you get at character creation and the things you get for advances and you're done. Loading a character basically encompasses creating a new character and then applying the steps that the user took to make the character in the first place. Bottom line: this has turned out to be a fairly simple process and it should be ready in the next beta.

Character output has been the last big thing that I've decided to tackle and thus far it has had the least amount of time devoted to it. From the very beginning, Wild Card Creator has been able to display characters in the standard Savage Worlds statblock that you find in the books. Next on the docket will probably be the "expanded" stat block that is like the normal stat block, but includes descriptions for Edges, Hindrances, Powers, etc. at the expense of compactness. This is especially great for con games where new players don't know what certain Edges do. Finally, work on the XML character sheets and form-fillable PDFs will be done simultaneously since they work on pretty much the same principle (take a part of the character and put it in a designated spot).

Cheyenne Wright has been continuing to work on the commissioned character portraits. He's sending them to me in bulk when they're done, so I don't have more to show you (besides, I'd like to leave a bit of surprise for the first time you open Wild Card Creator).

For those of you who pledged at a level where a character of your creation would be included as a pregen, but you hadn't submitted your character yet, your procrastination is going to pay off. If you're one of those people, you'll just create your character in the Wild Card Creator backer beta (see below), then submit it to me. The only catch is that if you're making your character for a setting that isn't support it yet, you'll have to still make it by hand. And for all of you that already have submitted a character, I'll do the work for adding it into Wild Card Creator! Relax, you don't need to do anything more!

Now the big question: when is it going to be released? I've decided to take my cue from Pinnacle and reply "when it's done" until I am 100% sure of when it will be done. That said, I'm going to commit to saying that Wild Card Creator will be released with plenty of time to make characters for any Savage Worlds games running at Origins Game Fair. So if you're planning on running Savage Worlds games (and going for the Pinnacle GM Event Pack), you can create your characters with Wild Card Creator, making beautiful character sheets and saving time that you can use to prep some really stellar games!

But wait, what about that backer beta I mentioned earlier? Yup, that's going to happen. I've decided that when Wild Card Creator is nearing release, all backers will be part of a backer-only beta of Wild Card Creator, allowing you to use the program before anybody else and help spot any more issues that occur before it goes public. So the final release should give you plenty of time before Origins, and the backer beta will give you even more time. Good news all around!

I'd like to thank you all for your continued excitement in the project! I'll continue to keep you all informed about developments as they continue. And there may be some surprises not too far on the horizon as well!

Wild Card Creator beta testing has begun and it's moving along steadily. I've already gotten some great feedback and fixed some issues (in particular, some challenges in getting Wild Card Creator to work equally well on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux).

In other news, Cheyenne Wright has begun working on the commissioned portraits for the Heroic and Legendary tier backers. The first one he sent me was of "Buck", which the backer had described as a "Colonial Ranger Stallion Aerospace Pilot" for Hell on Earth/Lost Colony. And it turned out really well!

Incredible work and some great attention to detail! I especially like the stylized Deadlands Marshal's star on the shoulder pad. I'm really looking forward to more of Cheyenne Wright's work as I'm sure all of you are!

The portrait of Buck, and all the others, will come with Wild Card Creator in a library of artwork by Cheyenne Wright and Storn Cook that you can use for your own characters! (You can add your own pictures too). And each of them will also have a pregen attached to it, so you can play the character that inspired each piece of art!