Drawing attention to the things that matter
In case you missed it, there was a major announcement in Discord last week: everyone who purchased a license now gets an additional 5% off future license purchases.
Yes, yes ... but what does it all mean, Basil?
Simply put, any purchases you make for Overseer Studio - whether it's an additional license key, or a gift certificate for your favorite Game Master - will automatically save an additional 5% off Early Access pricing. You can even share your referral code to give your friend 5% off too!
To access your referral code, navigate to your Account Dashboard and click "Copy" next to your referral link to share it.
This is just a small way to say, "thank you!" for supporting Overseer Studio.
Now back to our regularly scheduled update.
Drawing attention
Drawing tools have been a long-requested feature. This was something I was eager to build but wanted to ensure we have the right User Experience (UX) in place before committing to this feature.
After months in development, you can now draw over your canvas and tiles using a simple Pen tool and erase drawings using the Eraser tool.
Change the brush size, color, and even line style. Choose from solid lines, dashed lines, and dotted lines when drawing on your tiles or canvas.
Drawings are part of your canvas which means they move and scale just like tiles. Circle your goblin encounter in red or write yourself a quick note off the side.
Search everything, find anything
When I sat down and started planning Overseer's features over a year ago, I imagined a program that could search anything on your GM screen - this includes content that lives inside your tiles.
The search bar on the sidebar now searches all content on your GM screen, including content inside of PDFs, documents, and more. Plugin developers can also leverage this feature by posting their search results and reacting to a user clicking search results on the sidebar. Update the D&D 5e SRD Tools plugin to see this feature in action.
Plugins
I have spent an unreasonable amount of time working on publisher tools. As I work through the tools publishers will use to create and sell official adventures, I realized that the way we manage plugins is somewhat convoluted.
In this update, Manage plugins is now rendered on it's own screen as opposed to nested inside of Settings.
It's a small change, but it's one that will make it far easier to manage hundreds of plugins in the future.
Draw on your canvas using new drawing tools. Find literally anything in a tile with the new global search bar. Plus a bunch of other highly requested features and fixes!
✨ Features
Search anything and everything - Use the search bar on the sidebar to search content inside tiles
Plugin developers can utilize new SDK search methods to listen to and react to search events
Drawing tools - Use the Pen and Eraser tools to draw directly on the canvas
Change the brush size, color, and style from solid/dotted/dashed
Dedicated Plugins screen - Moved Plugins out of Settings into it's own dedicated screen
Improves readability of settings and improves organization for users with dozens or hundreds of plugins
🔧 Enhancements
Improved color picker - The color picker has been upgraded to include swatches and make it easier to choose custom colors
Drag multiple files onto canvas - Take any number of files from your computer and drag it directly onto the canvas
Check for updates - Added a button under the Main menu to manually check for updates
Build version date - Added a version date under Settings > About to add information about when a build was published
Saving indicator - The sidebar will show when an active save is in progress and will throw and error if any problems arise
Update toast - Shows a preview image for more engaging updates inside the app
🚀 Performance
Upgraded to Electron 44.5.1, improving performance and stability
🐛 Bugfixes
Fixed an issue where reordering a Website tile could break rendering
Fixed an issue where users could be dropped on the registration screen with no error if the license was already in use on another machine
📚 Documentation
Added references to new
onSearchandsetSearchablemethods to SDK
What's next?
There's a decent chance that the next couple of updates will be less focused on features and more focused on behind-the-scenes enhancements. I've been working on a tools for publishers and I want to ensure the application is setup for success.
That said, please join the Discord to suggest a feature or chat with other GMs using Overseer!