Just a quick update from the development of Echotopia Soundscape Designer.
This has to do with the way Echotopia will handle projects in general.
Projects are a complete set of scenes, maps, and sounds, together with all the settings. In a tabletop RPG context that would probably be your complete campaign.
Being a dungeon master can be a difficult task. Lots of work needs to be saved, transferred, and resources to be managed.
As Echotopia is a soundscape designer application and not a soundscape generator, it comes with the added value that you can use custom assets to create unique acoustic environments. But this comes with the extra need to also manage those assets.
In SoundFellas we don't want you to be a slave of our tools, we want our tools to liberate your creativity, and that means taking away the hustle of management.
Role-playing games are community activities, so sharing and moving your project around should be fast and easy for both the creator and any other person that will use the project.
That is why we designed Echotopia's project management to be similar to a game editor like Unity or Unreal, meaning that the project is fully portable. This of course adds to the complexity of things in general, as the project's asset management has to be done from within the application. But the added value is of course the easiness of having a project containing your complete campaign, its maps, and its sounds in one folder, ready to be copied and opened anywhere you need.
I'm in the happy position to announce that the project portability is fully working in our internal alpha version.
In the following video, I show how simple it is to:
- Copy a project file to share or backup.
- Transfer a project to another drive.
- Open a project directly from a USB drive.
Pretty easy right? A few clicks and your precious project is now all ready to load from another drive, even on the go.
Well, that's it for now, I'm gonna get back to coding. My next focus is the user interface and the overall feel of the application, as always I'll post development here in our blog.
Until next time...
