Hi pickin_grinnin (and others). Rob, the Realm Works Lead Developer, asked me to post the response below, as he hasn’t had time to create an EN World account at this time. You make many assertions about Realm Works and Lone Wolf Development as a company, and I hope that you take the time to read through all of Rob’s post. While it’s unlikely that Rob will take the time to post again (as he’s working on Realm Works), I’ll try to answer any follow-up questions you may have. You’re also welcome to PM me directly.
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Rob:
I asked Liz to post this on my behalf, and hopefully she can fill in any cracks I may have overlooked. You’ve made a lot of claims and asked a few questions, so I’m going to take the time to respond to them as best I can. My priority is on product development, so I likely won’t be commenting further on this. I hope this proves sufficient.
You assert that you love Hero Lab. However, based on the rest of your assessment of Realm Works, I think it’s safe to say that you didn’t use Hero Lab in the early years. If you had, you almost certainly would have portrayed it the same way you now portray Realm Works. That’s because the two products have a very similar evolutionary path. And that evolution is the only reason that Hero Lab is as powerful and flexible as it is today. The resulting power and flexibility is the only way Hero Lab could possibly accommodate all the craziness of Pathfinder, Shadowrun, and a bunch of other incredibly complex game systems. Those same attributes are cornerstones of Realm Works.
Let’s first look at Hero Lab a bit further to help me explain. How would someone go about creating something like Hero Lab? They’d have to consider all the different ways in which RPGs are designed and how they operate. They’d have to distill out hundreds of different approaches to various aspects of games, then they’d have to figure out how to accommodate those different approaches in virtually any combination a game designer can think up. They’d also have to anticipate how to incorporate new approaches that nobody has thought up yet so that the product can be extended and they can be woven in. Once they worked through all that, they’d need to actually implement it all. That’s a huge undertaking.
The reality is that Hero Lab is essentially a mammoth iceberg. The part you see and interact with is the tiny portion above the surface. Beneath the surface, there is an incredibly complex and versatile body of code that makes it all possible. Yet nobody ever sees the part of the iceberg that’s under the waves. That’s why (a) numerous gamers naively proclaim “it should be easy” to write a decent character creation tool, (b) a long list of people have tried to develop character creation tools over the years, and (c) only a scant few have produced something even remotely worthwhile. The “Titanic” analogy applies perfectly here.
So let’s look at Realm Works now. It’s been architected and designed – and substantially written – by the same person who architected and designed Hero Lab (me). So the same approach has been taken. However, the complexity is at least another order of magnitude greater. We’re no longer looking simply at how game designers create RPGs. We’re now looking at how GMs prepare for games and gaming groups actually play games. There are as many different ways of doing that as there are gamers. Yet there are a vast number of common elements across large cross-sections of gamers, so we’ve distilled many of those out and modeled them effectively within Realm Works.
The gotcha is that the complexity is huge, and we’re building Realm Works for the long run. You can’t build a skyscraper on the foundation for a small house. As we extend the capabilities of Realm Works, we have to put extensive foundation work in place to support not just what we’re adding today, but everything we’re envisioning for the future. From the outside, it may look like we’re making slower progress than you think we should. The reality is that, in addition to the features you see within the product, we’re also building the iceberg beneath the surface – the part you don’t see. The further along we get, the more robust and extensive the iceberg beneath the waves becomes, and we begin to make faster headway on the pieces above the surface that users see. That’s what happened with Hero Lab and that’s starting to occur with Realm Works. Once the Content Market and web access both come online in the upcoming months, we’ll be in great shape and begin to see significantly faster progress on the pieces above the surface.
As for the development team and effort being put in, here are the basics. We have a dedicated team on Realm Works. The Hero Lab team is completely separate and even uses a completely different programming language. The problem is that our team on Realm Works is only a few strong. Why is that? Because we have to operate within our means, and developers are expensive. For some perspective, the recent Kickstarter attempt by Trapdoor Technologies sought a HALF-MILLION dollars for SIX MONTHS. If we had that level of funding for Realm Works, we would be making incredible progress. Alas, this is the tabletop gaming industry, and we’re entirely self-funded, so we make steady headway with the resources available. Are we going fast enough to satisfy everyone? Nope. But, at this point, I believe we’re far enough ahead of anyone else in terms of the technology we’ve developed that it will require someone investing significant resources to catch-up and overtake us.
You’ve made it clear that printing is a deal-breaker feature for you. You’ve been heard. In fact, all the clamor on our forums for various features was a key reason we undertook the user survey that we just completed. We wanted to know just how important each feature was to what portion of the user base. Unfortunately for your interests, our users collectively placed printing smack dab in the middle, with almost a dozen major capabilities being considered more important than printing. So we’re focusing on the things that our users want most. I’m sorry if you consider that poor business on our part, but I think anyone looking at this objectively would agree with our approach.
I understand that you won’t use Realm Works until printing is added because you don’t trust us. Lone Wolf Development has been in business for more than 20 years now, and we’ve been creating software tools for tabletop gamers for 17 of those years. We’ve fostered a great deal of trust with tens of thousands of gamers during that period. If you choose not to trust us due to your experience with other companies, you’re entitled to that approach. However, there are plenty of other gamers out there that don’t share that opinion.
Now, I need to respond to some of your assertions about Realm Works and the company, as you’ve cast many aspersions towards both throughout your post. Unfortunately, you make references without any details, so I’m unable to challenge any of them concretely. However, I will do my best to interpret your comments and respond accordingly…
- You said we “haven’t brought the existing paid version up to speed yet”. I don’t know what you mean by that without any details, so unfortunately, I cannot respond.
- Then you assert it’s due to either “monetary desperation” or “lack of business focus”. As I outlined above, we operate within our means and the just-completed user survey gives us absolute certainty where we should be focusing our priorities. I’m not sure how you’re reaching your conclusions.
- You then go on to say you “don't see the commitment of time being put into it to fix the existing issues”. We fix bugs on a steady basis – most recently last Friday – and the product is pretty darn stable and robust at this point. Are there existing issues that you’re still encountering? If so, we have a bug reporting system in place for users to report issues so that we can respond as quickly as possible.
- And then you say we don’t give Realm Works “the basic functionality that has been promised all along”. If you’re talking about the web-based access and the Content Market, I indicated above that it looks like those should be available in the months ahead. If you’re referring to printing, I believe I’ve addressed why it’s important to us to focus on the features that our users have collectively said are most important.
- And you finally call us “not professional” and “not good businesspeople”. I may be wrong here, but I believe there are numerous ENWorld users who would disagree with the former claim based on their dealings with us over the years. For the latter, I would argue that doing the survey and focusing on what users want the most is a core hallmark of “good businesspeople”.
As we demonstrated with Hero Lab, there’s a cohesive vision, and we’re staying the course to realize it. If some gamers want to wait until everything is perfect and continue using (in our and others’ opinions) less optimal approaches, they are welcome to do so. For those GMs who want to simplify a lot of their preparation efforts and streamline game play today, Realm Works is already a significant improvement over the alternatives – especially the traditional pen-and-paper or disjointed notes in assorted Word documents approaches. And Realm Works continues to get better with every new release. The only requirement is that users need an electronic device at the table, since we don’t yet support printing.
I hope this answers your questions and, for others reading, addresses the various assertions you’ve made about Realm Works and the company. Thank you to everyone for taking the time to read all the way through this.
