I couldn’t find the perfect battle-mapping tool, so I went against all rational thought and made one
During COVID, I went WAY down the rabbit hole on VTT and moving my sessions online.
And going online of course means so… many… battlemaps…
I went through probably 5 different mapping platforms, including just trying it in Illustrator, but none of them were easy to use. They either had huge limitations in their asset sets, or just had UI that was an abomination to all that is good in the world.
As a personal project, I started developing Artifax Mapper, so that I could bring all of the systems that designers have been enjoying for over a decade to map building. Things like:
- Procedurally generated areas
- Lighting effects
- Just… bog standard layer trees and editing
- An undo button that makes sense
Wouldn’t that be nice?
Artifax allows you to build out maps through auto-decoration of rooms, woods, cottages, cities, rivers, etc. You can bring in your own assets from the creators you already support, import them natively and have them work right out of the box. You can also export them to any of your VTT systems with all the lights, doors and more baked right in. There’s also a TON of stuff that I’m working on, since this is still very much in alpha.
I’d love it if people could take a look and give me any feedback on what looks cool, what looks like crap, and what features I could add to make this the best map building program out there.
Check out the demo here:
Also, if you’re interested in helping me test it, I have a form here: artifaxstudio.com/interest-alpha
Taggedalphafeedbacktesting