SmiteWorks Hires D&D Beyond Founder as Chief Development Officer of Fantasy Grounds

SmiteWorks, owner of the Fantasy Grounds virtual tabletop, announced today that they hired Adam Bradford as their Chief Development Officer. Bradford was the founder of D&D Beyond, before leaving to join Demiplane, a generic D&D Beyond-style platform aimed at some game systems.

SmiteWorks USA, LLC, the developer behind the leading virtual tabletop software, Fantasy Grounds, is excited to announce the appointment of Adam Bradford as its new Chief Development Officer (CDO). Adam Bradford, a prominent figure in the tabletop gaming industry, brings a wealth of experience and expertise that will be instrumental in driving the company’s growth and innovation.

Adam Bradford is well-known for his pioneering work in the digital gaming space. He founded D&D Beyond, a digital toolset that transformed the way Dungeons & Dragons is played. Under his leadership, D&D Beyond experienced significant growth and was eventually acquired by Hasbro. Following this success, Adam joined Demiplane, another online tabletop roleplaying game company, where he led the development for a digital tools platform for a variety of other games, further cementing his reputation as a visionary in the industry.

In his new role at SmiteWorks, Adam will focus on expanding Fantasy Grounds’ market presence, enhancing user engagement, and user experience. He will oversee strategic initiatives across product development, business development, marketing, community engagement, and user acquisition. Adam’s innovative approach and proven track record make him an ideal fit for SmiteWorks as the company continues to push the boundaries of digital tabletop gaming.

"We are thrilled to welcome Adam Bradford to the SmiteWorks team," said Doug Davison, President of SmiteWorks USA, LLC. "Adam's expertise and vision will be invaluable as we work to grow Fantasy Grounds and provide our users with the best possible tabletop gaming experience. We have a lot of great things in the works for Fantasy Grounds and we believe Adam is the perfect addition to help us achieve our goals."

Adam Bradford expressed his enthusiasm for joining SmiteWorks, stating, "I am incredibly excited to be joining SmiteWorks and to have the opportunity to contribute to the ongoing success of Fantasy Grounds. The virtual tabletop space is evolving rapidly to make playing these games we love more convenient than ever, and I look forward to working with the outstanding team at SmiteWorks to continue driving innovation and growth in the tabletop roleplaying space."[/callout[]

 

[UngainlyTitan]

The problem with that is that making new windows like that are very complicated programming wise I understand. There's very few programs out there that do this (AFAIK)

Yes and no, it has always been possible to create containerless applications. At least once multitasking operating systems came on the scene. My understanding is that FG was initially built without such support. Changing the UI interface basically requires a complete rebuild of the UI and all its supporting code.
Doing this without so radically changing the UI as to lose the current customers, because everything would be new and have to be relearned is a large task.
Essentially one has to rewrite everything to support where one wants to go, while supporting all current functionality and without breaking anything.

 

[NickFrostRPG]

Congrats on the new position!

FG is my VTT of choice for every ruleset it supports.

 

[talien]

The problem with that is that making new windows like that are very complicated programming wise I understand. There's very few programs out there that do this (AFAIK).

Roll20 does this: My Settings - Roll20 Wiki

 

[Nylanfs]

Roll20 does this: My Settings - Roll20 Wiki

That's because it uses a browser as it's base engine, so it already has that capability built in.

 

[LordEntrails]

Related news: Roll20 Announces Purchase of Demiplane (Exclusive)

 

[primo]

I suspect that this is not a capability that's THAT hard to do. It's far from uncommon. The difficulty, I suspect, will be in the FG legacy code, windowing toolkit/library etc etc. It can be much harder to retrofit capabilities like that onto an old app than it is to build a new app from the ground up that supports it.

Fantasy Grounds now runs on the Unity engine, which I believe is not capable of such feat. Also, nice to have Adam! FGU is geting huge year after year, and this 20th anniversary year is proving how great of a tool FG will become.

 

[Zaukrie]

Related news: Roll20 Announces Purchase of Demiplane (Exclusive)

Wow

 

[Zaukrie]

I won't use a VTT where I can't pop out windows.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Fantasy Grounds now runs on the Unity engine, which I believe is not capable of such feat. Also, nice to have Adam! FGU is geting huge year after year, and this 20th anniversary year is proving how great of a tool FG will become.

They could run UI windows outside the Unity engine. For instance, they could create the UI in a C# or C++ (or other development platform) and just warp the unity application in this. Only the fancy graphical elements need to be in Unity, the rest are simply text presentation and editing linked to background databases.

I mean that is practically what they are currently doing. The UI, chat window and all the text windows are written in whatever the application was originally written in which talked to an xml file based database and whatever originally did the maps and the network code.
When they transferred to Unity they replaced the network code and the mapping layer and perhaps the file storage elements and left the rest more or less unchanged.
Now, I believe (though I could be wrong) is that the remaining UI elements are divided between the core application and the rules engines.
Now a sensible architecture would separate out rules automation as much as possible from UI concerns and they appear to be working on this.

 

[NickFrostRPG]

They could run UI windows outside the Unity engine [...]

The problem with this is FGU is not Windows-exclusive...