For the last 20 years, I’ve been playing tabletop RPGs with friends on a very regular basis. I’ve spent a huge amount of time writing scenarii and missions. I did it with traditional pen & papers at first, and with Google Docs afterwards.

Problem is: it’s ok to write missions with Google Docs, until it comes to drawing the map of, say, a dungeon in Warhammer, or a haunted house in Cthulhu. Most of the dedicated tools are either:

• old: like with a Win95 interface with almost zero attention to ergonomy
• bloated: the tools allows EVERY single thing related to drawing a map, and therefore, is too complicated for my simple needs.
• ugly: the tool uses lots of terrible textures where I just want to draw walls and doors.

For some times now, I’ve been using Photoshop to paint my maps. But let’s face it. It’s a great tool, but it has not been designed for that purpose. And it’s not free.

So I’ve decided to work on my own tool, with the sacred KiSS principle in mind (Keep it Short & Simple).

Here is a demo (Flash Player 11.2 required). Note: you can rotate doors using right click.

Features I plan to implement for 1.0 release:

• focus on making a simple greyshades render, printer friendly, no fancy texture or icon.
• focus on ease of use and ergonomy,
• free & open source (haxe required),
• save/load on disk,
• export as PNG,
• new tool: text labels,
• new tool: furnitures assets (mostly rectangles and circles),
• new tool: symbols (cross, arrow, …)
• bigger maps, with scrolling,
• I may also fork the project to build a simple map editor for small game projects (developer oriented, like for a Ludum Dare game). This version would feature JSon save/load, adding generic data to cells (like doors, monsters, whatever you want)…