Time To Properly introduce The Story Canvas!

The Story Canvas. If you’ve been following the development of LoreMaster.io, you’ve undoubtedly heard about it before. It is even mentioned on our frontpage! In this post I will dive into what exactly the Story Canvas is, what it can do, and how it is coming along!

What is the Story Canvas?

The Story Canvas is a feature in LoreMaster.io. It is a document type like the Lore Page explained in a former blog post. The Lore Page is a tool for writing down notes and more traditional textual worldbuilding. On the other hand, the Story Canvas is a more visual way to organize your world. We know that many worldbuilders are very visual creators, which is why we have prioritised the Story Canvas as one of the core features of LoreMaster.io!

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What can you do with the Story Canvas?

We have already talked about some of the use cases we have imagined back in our first blog post.

The individual functionalities of the Story Canvas are simple. When creating a new Story Canvas, you are presented with a blank canvas. On this canvas or workspace, you can choose to use it without an illustration, or you can choose an image to function as a background. On the canvas you can then place “nodes”. These nodes are points on the canvas which you can interact with. They are represented by an icon you can choose and customize to make it easily identifiable. Clicking the node opens the “node panel” for this specific node. Within the node panel you have a short area for quick general notes about the node or what it represents. The main functionality of the node panel is however the ability to link Lore Pages to it. This makes it easy to navigate to the relevant notes you have about your world!

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Depending on how you wish to set up the Story Canvas, possible functionalities include interactive world- or region maps, structured character hierarchies, event trees, or something completely different.

So how far along is the Story Canvas in development?

The Story Canvas is a large feature. As such, we need to make sure it works properly before we start testing. We have already been working on the Story Canvas for the last couple of weeks. We are at the point where the node creation and image uploading works locally. The linking between the pages and a media library have yet to be implemented. Both are features that will not only be usable in the Story Canvas, but throughout LoreMaster.io and as such it is important that these features work properly.

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For now we plan to have the basic testing of the Story Canvas in two weeks. We will let you know when we will be looking for testers once we get closer. This is of couse subject to change. as development can at times be a fickle mistress!

What else is going on?

Why thank you for asking! There’s a new element on our front page. This is the ability to get a mail notification when LoreMaster.io is actually out. If you don’t care much for development or social media, this is the way to stay updated. Besides this, we are currently getting ready to focus a bit more on our studies. This will mean that updates might be a bit more far between after the Story Canvas testing.

In other news, because we live in Denmark we sadly did not get our copies of Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything today, but will have to wait until Monday the 1st of December. Another casualty of Covid-19 sadly, but we are of course looking forward to receiving our copies so we can see what new stuff are in there that might be relevant for the future development of LoreMaster.io!

Until next time, all the best!
The LoreMaster.io Team

Development The Story Canvas