Hobby project. Sole contributor.

This is a geeky little side project I’m developing in my rare spare time. It is a tool for world builders and tabletop enthusiasts that allows them to turn their static maps into living, and stylish, interactive installations for your players and yourself. Gone are the days of using standard modern web-UIs with GPS style markers for this purpose. You can take any map you own, quickly add an interactive layer of map nodes, and immediately have an interactive map that fits your setting and that can be shared with your players.

The Living Map has the following key features:

• High-fidelity visuals. The Living Map is built in Unity, a powerful graphics engine. This allows it to utilize post-processing effects, particle systems, sprite animations, and a linear color space to create a gorgeous, living environment for your maps.

• Simple creation tools. Using The Living Map’s creator tool, you can quickly annotate your map with simple map markers containing lore snippets about points of interest on your map, and add visual and auditory effects that fit your campaign style.

• Easy to share. As a map creator, you can generate a creator file containing your living map that players can load into the tool. Moreover, you can define levels of access for specific players, allowing you to provide different players with distinct versions of lore snippets, or add additional snippets for some players. The creator file can also be hosted online in a location of your own choosing for continuous live updates.

• One-time purchase at most. I’m not completely set on how I will distribute The Living Map, but if I commercialize it, it will be a one-time purchase with no subscription model.

I think Dungeons and Dragons is the best game ever created. I’m an avid player, and I am also a recurring dungeon master. That’s the person in charge of facilitating the game for the players. You interpret and mediate the rules, and design a campaign of encounters, locations, and story beats that help create a collaborative narrative for and with your players.

As the dungeon master, your campaign either takes place in a setting someone else has created, or in a world of your own imagination. You often end up with a world map of some kind, whether just a quick sketch or something more elaborate, to give your players a frame of reference for the geography of the setting and their location within it. While creating a new setting for my group of players, I found myself wanting to share the map for it. But moreover, I wanted to annotate it with snippets of lore, so the players would know a few key locations without needing to cross-reference a PDF.

I looked around for existing tools for annotating maps, but the ones I found used standard web style interfaces that end up looking like Google Maps. Moreover, most of them had some complex subscription-based cloud infrastructure to host and share the maps and annotations. I wanted my map to be presented in a more immersive format, and be accessible in a simple offline format. This is the inspiration for The Living Map. I work on it as often as I can, and will share a beta build when it is ready.