Dev Update: Better Boards

When we first launched Boards, our freeform whiteboard, we saw it as one of the four pillars of LegendKeeper: Maps for geography, Wiki Pages for knowledge, Timelines for causality, and Boards for... everything else. But "everything else" is a big ask, and the first version just wasn't cutting it. It had a lot of janky interactions and missing features.

While Timelines is still wrapped up in some design work, we decided to rebuild Boards from the ground up. We've launched it, and we're already seeing the community build awesome stuff!

A dungeon/encounter board annotated with lore, courtesy of Kysa from the Discord.

Let's go through some of the improvements in Boards V2!

Media

Drag and drop or use the image shortcut from the toolbar. Adjust image crop by holding CTRL while adjusting the boundary box.

You can finally insert images! You can select the image tool to insert from your library, or drag and drop an image directly. The dropped image will be automatically uploaded to your asset library.

You can also copy-paste YouTube or Spotify Album URLs to embed rich media players.

Element cards

Insert element cards by dragging them from the panel on the left. They can now be resized to arbitrary sizes, and once they're big enough, they'll embed the actual content. (You can disable this behavior by putting the shape in edit mode and toggling "Allow Embed".)

Interlink your content in a variety of interesting ways. Embed elements from your wiki to make family treets, faction diagrams, quest flows, and more. Resize to nest a map or page. You can even edit nested page.

Shape locking

Locking layers and interactions. Locked shapes keep them from being modified. Additionally, locked element shapes can act like buttons and display a preview when clicked.

When you have a shape in the perfect spot, lock it to keep it there. Locked element cards will act like pins and open up the fly-out preview when clicked.

More tools and shapes

There's a variety of new shapes including triangles, stars, arrows, and clouds. Double most shapes to add text.

Stylish options

Changing styles is easy! Use the styles controller to customize your text, shapes, arrows, and more.

The styles controller has been expanded to include a variety of new options, including opacity and fill options (for applicable shapes.)

External URLs

Create a web of resources using bookmark cards. Copy and paste a url to automatically generate a bookmark card.

When you copy paste an external URL, it will be turned into a Bookmark, that will display link metadata, like the title, excerpt, and image. (If the target website has this kind of metadata)

Stay organized with frames. Use frames to organize your boards into labeled regions.

Use the frame tool to group sections of your board into labeled frames.

Better collaboration

If you collaborate with others on boards, you'll notice that multiplayer updates are much smoother now.

There's a lot more to discover! Click buttons, dive into menus, right click things, and you'll find quite a few new features! Let us know what you think!

What's next!

Timelines is still our priority. While most of the feature is finished, we're working on some of the crunchier configuration UI; things like leap days, intercalary months, etc.

After that, we'll be working on some UI upgrades that will enable more customization, colors, fonts, etc.