Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Dungeon Map Doodler Beta - Free online map drawing tool

dungeonmapdoodler.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 26 posts

Show HN: Dungeon Map Doodler Beta - Free online map drawing tool

#1

Post by toddrossdiy »

This is a D&D map making tool I've been working on for a while now, but I just added some new features to the beta that I think HN users might find neat. When building a world map, you can use "Dynamic Brushes" to draw organic looking terrain. This is achieved entirely with svg filters and javascript canvas, no fancy libraries or anything. This came with a pretty large rewrite of some of the underlying code, so I'm sure there's a number of bugs I haven't come across, but I'd love to hear your opinions on it!

Show HN: Dungeon Map Doodler Beta - Free online map drawing tool
dungeonmapdoodler.com

Re: Show HN: Dungeon Map Doodler Beta - Free online map drawing tool

#2

Post by ldd »

I have never played D&D (despite wanting to) but I really liked what you did.

It seems very well-made, though I bet people would appreciate one or two youtube tutorials (it seems very feature rich btw).You should try posting it on reddit and other sites to get more feedback.

Congrats!

Re: Show HN: Dungeon Map Doodler Beta - Free online map drawing tool

#6

Post by toddrossdiy »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #4

Always love new TTRPG tools!! I would love a paragraph about what differentiates this tool from the well known online alternatives. For example: https://app.dungeonscrawl.com/

So funny thing actually, me and him started working on our sites on almost the exact same day! We both saw some things on Twitter near the start of the pandemic that prompted us to begin these. I know he’s been working hard on a v2 of his site lately, but I took a long break from working on mine and haven’t really been following what others have been up to. Since I’ve been compared to Dungeon Scrawl quite a bit over time, I always said that his felt like it was trying to be a professional tool like Photoshop, with a really complex and powerful interface. I was trying to be more like Paint, a program that anybody can open up and figure out 90% of it just by poking around for a couple minutes.

Between the different drawing tools, the dynamic brushes, the style presets and texture options, you can create a pretty wide variety of maps with it. I know a lot of map making tools create maps with a very obvious style to them, but mine gives you a lot of flexibility while still taking just a few clicks to make it happen.

Hope you have fun playing around with it!

Re: Show HN: Dungeon Map Doodler Beta - Free online map drawing tool

#7

Post by drusepth »

I love this tool (and recommend it to some of my DM users quite often, and also added it to Fiction.Tools recently for writers to stumble upon). I've never used it for a D&D game, but I have used it from time to time to build out scaled maps for writing in. Very cool to see it getting constant updates; can't wait to check them out!
Post reply on HN