Devlog 4 - HP Tracker v1.5.0 (Patreon)

Everytime I work on a bigger update, I need smaller tasks in case I get stuck. So all ideas that pop in to my head get written down and when I need a distraction or like Gandalf (of course I am Gandalf) need to chose the right path, I take some time off of the main feature and work on these little ideas.

In this case I wasn't really stuck, but actually was already finished with the statblock popover feature. I am really happy how it turned out and will gather some feedback after the release to improve where it needs improving. So that the main feature is done, why not just release and leave the small ideas for smaller updates? Well one really annoying part about Software Development is writing documentation.

Writing documentation is hard and it's annoying. It takes lots of time and it's best with screenshots or videos. But what if those videos are outdated because of some new feature? You got to record them all again. And then convert them and name them and upload them and and and. So some of these small ideas get postponed a lot because they would cause me to redo a lot of my documentation. But when I have a big feature, which forces me to redo some of the documentation anyway, I get a chance to do one of these ideas for "free".

The current one has been on my mind a lot. When I added the group feature, it was because I was setting up Cragmaw Castle for one of my groups and I had about 20 Goblin Tokens in the Scene. To get a little more order and overview I added groups and Drag and Drop to switch Tokens between the groups. But it was a quick shot. I didn't really care a lot about the design so it ended up looking, well not ugly, but not cohesive. And because the damn groups were in every screenshot and video I knew I'd have to redo most of them.

So I finally did what had to be done and updated the groups. They now include better labeling (with an icon) so it's clear you are looking at a group. As well as group-scope settings. Where as a GM you can set all settings for all the tokens in a group. Also there is now an initiative button where you can roll for the whole group maybe saving lots of time when getting ready for a fight.

And last but not least, on the first release I got feedback that the group show/hide buttons looked to much like owlbears item show/hide buttons and it could be confusing. But as I explained the screenshots had been made and I didn't want to redo them all, but now, finally I changed them to look like all the other show/hide buttons in HP Tracker (Thank you Andrew for your feedback and sorry it took so long). And I also added a little transition when clicking the button, so the group doesn't just pop into the view.

The only thing I really want to get working in this version is multidrag because of the documentation issue. But once this is done I start writing documentation and getting ready for a release. The Beta version is already out for Goblins (I think I need better names for Patreon tiers) if you want to test these new features before everybody else.

Happy Tracking,Josh