Quest Creator Weekly: Improved Design and Example Conversation

Creators,

This week's updates: win a copy, improved design and an example of how to implement a conversation!

Win a copy

As a reminder, we're giving away a free copy of Expedition to the best quest each week.

This week's theme: time travel

There were no submissions this past week (make sure to hit "Publish" to make it visible!), so nobody won a copy. If you've been thinking about writing a quest, or just have a few finishing touches to put on your quest, this week's a great time to do it! Published quests are due by Sunday at midnight EST.

Improved Design

This week, we updated the Quest Creator experience. Now, when you visit the main page, you're greeted with a much more comprehensive homepage that matches the theme of the Expedition website. Over the coming weeks, we'll be continuing to implement new design improvements and features to make your experience easier and more enjoyable.

Also - we'd love to hear what you think about the new homepage. If anything's unclear, or we could do a better job explaining something, let us know at Expedition@Fabricate.io!

Example Conversation

Here's a quick tutorial on a cool technique you can use to make your next quest even more awesome:

From one of our recent award-winning quests, here's an example of a dynamic conversation (or market, or exploring sequence) where each path may only be taken once. Shout out to Daniel Riddle for sharing this technique with us!

_Conversation_ (#conversationSetup)

// variables that were set during your adventuring

{{sawMagic = true}}

{{haveKey = false}}

You walk into the room and nod to the mage.

_Conversation_ (#conversation)

You prepare to ask the mage a question:

* {{sawMagic == true & _.viewCount("magicQuestion") == 0}} So, how about that magic?

        _About the magic_ (#magicQuestion)

        *silence*

        **goto conversation**

* {{haveKey == true & _.viewCount("keyQuestion") == 0}} What is this key for?

        _About the key_ (#keyQuestion)

        "That's for a door", he says.

        **goto conversation**

_Carrying On_

Having run out of questions, you leave the room.

Until next week,

Todd & Scott

Quest Creator Weekly: Collaborative editing and our first weekly winner!

Storytellers,

We're excited to announce that Azure Agents Chapter 1 by GraphiteHelix is our first weekly quest winner! Congratulations to GraphiteHelix on winning a free copy of Expedition - and make sure to check it out on your next adventure!

Win a copy

You have until this Saturday at midnight EST to submit a quest to be eligible for this week's contest and have a chance at winning a free copy of Expedition. May the best quest win!

Collaborative Editing

Did you know that the Quest Creator supports sharing and collaborative editing? Simply share the quest's Google Doc with a friend, and both of you can work on it at the same time, just like Google Docs! This feature is still in beta, so if you run into any bugs (or have any suggestions on how we can improve it) please email us at Expedition@Fabricate.io!

Adventure onwards,

Todd & Scott

New features & quests, win a copy, and the future of Expedition!

Adventurers,

Several exciting updates this month!

• Unveiling the future of Expedition
• Announcing the award-winning new quests from Quest Quest 2
• How to win a copy of Expedition
• Improved combat rules
• New features and fixes for the app

The Future of Expedition

We've been listening to your favorite parts of Expedition and it keeps coming back to this: a game that's endlessly replayable, with new and interesting content every time you play. And we agree!

Which is why, starting today, our official vision for Expedition is to create the world's best library of quests and adventures. With new quests every week and a large collection of high-quality adventures, there'll always be something new to play!

Over the next few months, we'll be working hard to make this vision a reality for you:

• Each week, we're giving away a free copy of Expedition to the best new quest written in the Quest Creator (see below for more details).
• Upcoming features like family-friendly quests, ratings and reviews will make it easier for you to discover and enjoy the best quests.
• You'll be able to pay what you want - and only what you want - for quests. For people who want to play great quests, this gives you the chance to support creators on your own terms. For quest writers, this gives you the financial support to build amazing quests. All while keeping Expedition ad-free and open source.

New Quests & Winners

For the past two months, amazing community members like yourself have been hard at work crafting adventures that are now available for your enjoyment.

First of all, thank you to everyone who participated in Quest Quest 2! If we had enough battleaxes, we'd ship one to every single one of you. But, alas, battleaxes are in short supply these days and we could only pick three winners.

As a reminder, the categories:

• Adventurer vs Adventurer - Two teams fighting each other? An evil mastermind? Secret identities and a hidden traitor? You decide!
• Most Dynamic Quest - The quest that responds the most to user input with branching and dynamic choices with real consequences.
• Crowd Favorite - The quest that receives the highest ratings from users.

And, without further ado, the winners:

• Adventurer vs Adventurer: Unlife of the Party by Daniel Riddle. An enchanting party whose twists and turns are best discovered with 3-5 friends!
• Most Dynamic Quest: Legend of the Mystics by Cory Smith. All we can say is... wow. Cory singlehandedly developed several really cool mechanics, including his own shopping and inventory system!
• Crowd Favorite: (L.C. #2) The Tournament by JanoNath. The second in the Landfaria Chronicles series, you'll participate in the big annual tournament....and perhaps uncover some dark secrets.
• Honorable Mention: Stormin' the Castle by Greg Miller. We're out of battle axes, but we'd be remiss to not applaud Greg's veritably verbose vocabulary and Monty Python-worthy jokes.

Congratulations, winners! We'll be in touch shortly to sort out prizes.

Win a copy of Expedition

Enjoyed writing for Quest Quest 2? Inspired to try your hand at telling a story? Now's the perfect time. For the next several months we aren't having just one contest... we're having a contest every week! Each week, the best new quest will win a free copy of Expedition!

The clock starts this Sunday at midnight! Don't wait, get started writing your first quest today at Quests.ExpeditionGame.com. If you have any questions or run into any issues, you can email Todd directly at Todd@Fabricate.io.

(Note that you don't have to write the quest in less than a week - your quest will just be judged the week it's published. "Best" will be judged by a combination of Scott and I, and user reviews. Ties will be broken by playtesters. Each user may submit up to one quest per week, and may win multiple weeks.)

Rules Improvement

Ever feel like you're playing the same ability or two over and over, especially at the start of a quest? Thanks to continued feedback from the community, we've made a refinement that helps prevent this. Now:

• When you play an ability, discard it.
• Each round, re-shuffle all abilities except those discarded.
• Once you have less than three abilities in your draw pile, shuffle in your discard pile.

We've also updated the combat rules in the app to reflect this improvement.

New App Features

Since last month, we've rolled out several improvements to your Expedition experience:

• Added new featured quest: Dungeon Crawl
• Added the ability to rate, review and report quests
• Optimized the web app to load 50% faster
• Built several new tools for quest creators, such as the ability to selectively award loot and abilities after combat (for example, so that you don't draw more loot right before the end of a quest)
• Fixed a bug where left / right arrows were too small, making them hard to tap on mobile devices.
• Improved the UI for large devices and tablets.

Thank you again for your support! As the first open source cards + app tabletop game, all of these improvements are driven by the community: app bug reports and feature requests on GitHub, quests written in the Quest Creator,  discussions held in the Subreddit.

As a reminder, if you enjoy Expedition, please consider rating it on Amazon and BoardGameGeek to help increase its visibility and grow the community!

Here's to a future full of adventure,

Todd & Scott

Quest Creator Weekly: Quest Quest extended until tonight!

Adventure Crafters,

We've decided to extend the Quest Quest 2 deadline until tonight at midnight.

For those who submitted on time: we've sent you feedback on your quest (if we missed yours, please let us know at Expedition@Fabricate.io) and we want to give you the opportunity to work on them a bit more before they go out for judging.

For those who missed the deadline, you can still submit by tonight!

This is not an April Fool's joke :)

When you hear from us next week, we'll have winners to announce!

Todd & Scott

Quest Creator Weekly: New Features!

Quest Creators,

Just in time for the last week of Quest Quest 2, we have two new features! As a reminder, Quest Quest 2 ends this Friday at midnight, so make sure to publish your quests before then.

Family Friendly

Many members of the Expedition community are parents playing with their kids. For them, playing community quests has been a risk... they don't know what they're about to play, and if it'll be appropriate for their kids.

No longer! Now, creators like yourself can include "familyfriendly: true" as part of the top metadata section. With this, parents will be able to search specifically for family friendly quests (we'll be rolling out the app functionality soon; we wanted to give you some time to update your quests before rolling this out to users).

Learn more about what it takes to make a quest family friendly here.

Please use this flag considerately. Users will be able to report quests for being inappropriate. We will review each case by hand, providing meaningful feedback and a chance for the creator to fix the mistake. Consistent and purposeful violation of this flag will not be tolerated: it is important to the community and our players that Expedition be fun for adventurers of all ages. (Note that you can still publish more mature and complex quests so long as you don't set familyfriendly to true).

Counting views

We've seen many quests do interesting things with a simple idea: if you've seen a specific card before, change your choices. For example, if you're in a conversation and have already asked someone "Who are you?", no longer show that option.

We've created a new and improved way to do this that also gives you more power! With _.viewCount("cardId"), you can get the number of times the card with that specific ID has been viewed. This makes it much easier to create conversations:

_Conversation loop (#conversation)_
You prepare to ask John a question...
* {{_.viewCount("question1") == 0}} Question 1
  _Question 1 (#question1)_
  His answer
  **goto conversation**
* {{_.viewCount("question2") == 0}} Question 2
  _Question 2 (#question2)_
  His answer
  **goto conversation**
* Leave
  _Leave_
  You leave the conversation and the loop

viewCount("cardId") also unlocks powerful new adventure and puzzle possibilities. For example, you could set up a lockpicking loop where, if the user's attempted it three times, their lockpick breaks and they are forced to try something else. Or, if they're walking through a maze and find themselves back in a place they've been before, you could subtly hint to the user "This looks familiar...". Note that you must use double quotes ("), not single quotes (') when referencing the card ID.

As always, you can learn about these and other Quest Creator features in the Quest Creator help.

We can't wait to see what you create!

Todd & Scott

Quest Creator weekly

Quest creators,

Expedition was at UnPub this weekend, so we have a lot of new players and ideas, but not much new code.

In lieu of new features for the week, some quick reminders:

• Pittsburgh writers: we're having our first quest writing night starting at 5pm this Saturday (March 25th) in Point Breeze. There'll be free food and booze! Email us at Expedition@Fabricate.io to RSVP and get the address.
• There's one week left in the Quest Quest 2! You must publish by midnight EST on the 31st to be eligible. We highly recommend publishing before then so that you can get feedback from other Expedition players!
• Please consider filling out the Quest Creator feedback form. It'll only take two minutes, and it'll help us prioritize how to improve your quest-writing experience!

That's all for this week - we can't wait to see your entries for the Quest Quest 2 - and stay tuned! Along with the winners, we'll be announcing the exciting future for Expedition!

All the best,

Todd & Scott

Quest Creator feature highlight: combat improvements

Quest Crafters,

You may have seen the new Dungeon Crawl featured quest in the updated app. It does some pretty cool new things - and we're here to show you how to utilize them in your quests!

Randomized enemies

Sometimes in a quest, it makes sense for the enemies to be random. Maybe you encounter a group of Bandit thugs, but it doesn't affect the story if they're tier 1 archers or tier 1 footpads. In cases like this, a touch of randomness can increase surprise and replayability.

You can use the following syntax to create random enemies - anything from a totally random enemy, to a random enemy of a specific class or tier, all the way to a random enemy of a specific class and tier:

_combat_
- {{_.randomEnemy()}}
- {{_.randomEnemyOfTier(1)}}
- {{_.randomEnemyOfClass("Bandit")}}
- {{_.randomEnemyOfClassTier("Bandit", 1)}}

Note: you must use double quotes (not single quotes) for strings inside of ops {{}}.

Customizable combat rewards

Next up is the highly-requested ability to customize what happens on combat victories. For example, you might not want to reward players with loot and xp for a battle they shouldn't have fought. Or, maybe they're on the run and don't have time to heal (or only partially heal) after the fight.

To do this, you simply annotate the combat on win outcome. Below, you can see what it looks like to disable loot and xp rewards, to disable healing, loot and xp, and to only allow the adventurers to partially heal (+6 health). Anything you don't define defaults to the normal: heal to full health and gain loot and xp.

* on win {"loot": false, "xp": false}
* on win {"heal": 0, "loot": false, "xp": false}
* on win {"heal": 6}

Note: In cases where adventurers won't heal at the end of combat, it's nice to warn them with an instruction node before combat starts so that they can make better choices - for example: > You're on the run! You won't heal after this encounter.

If you haven't yet, consider checking out the Quest Creator docs (also available via "Help" -> QDL Guide in the Quest Creator) for these and many more powerful features to use in your next quest!

Finally - please take this 2 minute survey so that we can better serve your quest-writing needs :)

Happy adventuring,

Todd & Scott

Expedition Monthly: March

Adventurers and role-players!

This month's update includes new quests, new features, and some quick announcements. 

Quest highlight

JanoNath published a fantastic 3 part quest - the Landfaria Chronicles. If you've been wondering what longer quests might look like in the Expedition RPG system, check it out! And many thanks to JanoNath for the amazing work and dedication in putting them together!

New features

• Dungeon Crawl! New on the app homepage - how deep can you delve? (Quest creators - in our next email, we'll cover some of the new tools and features used to make Dungeon Crawl that are now available to you).
• Improved loot balance: less loot is rewarded for large encounters to make loot easier to manage. Quest creators can now also set encounters to not reward loot, so that you don't draw a ton of loot after a boss fight, just to have the quest end.
• Improved app interface on larger displays + tablets.
• Streamlined combat flow: you can now tap 'win' and 'lose' without having to set the numbers all the way to 0 each time.

Announcements

• One month left in the Quest Quest 2! Try your hand at writing your very own quest, and have a chance to win some sweet loot!
• Conventions: Expedition will be at UnPub in Baltimore next weekend, and at GenCon in August. If you'll be at either, drop us a line via email or Twitter so that we can meet up!
• Game stores: If you'd like Expedition available where you live, consider approaching your local game store. Expedition was just picked up by several game store distributors, including ACD and GTS Distribution (USA), Universal Distribution (Canada), Brave New World Distribution (Europe) and Hit Point Sales (Worldwide).
• Contributing: we've just released guides for writing quests and contributing to the source code. If you want to help make Expedition even better, check them out!

May your sword be sharp on your next adventure,

Todd & Scott