As you may have heard, we’re in the process of undertaking our major modernization of the Roll20 virtual tabletop called Project Jumpgate. At the end of this process, we’ll be delivering an overhauled version of Roll20 that’s modern, performant, and a joy to use.
Project Jumpgate is rolling along smoothly here at Roll20, and we want to share another quick update with you all about the state of the project and a few of the exciting things we’ve been working hard to get ready for you.
State of the Project
Jumpgate is the primary initiative currently for the VTT team, which is the team primarily responsible for the maintaining and improving the virtual tabletop at Roll20. We’ve been focused on Jumpgate as our main effort for a few months now, and we’ve recently reached a stage where the Jumpgate version of Roll20 is around 75% feature-complete including that maps and tokens are working, the context menu is up and running, and measuring and layers work.
Right now we’re focused on filling in the final gaps on features, and then we’ll be moving on to some extensive QA testing to stomp out as many bugs as we can find before we open up our Beta for Pro Users.
The Beta itself will serve as the first opportunity for the Roll20 community to give feedback on the work we’re doing and help us catch any edge cases that we might have missed during our own internal testing. Our goal with Jumpgate is for you to be able to load up any current Roll20 game and have it all just work seamlessly – better performance and lots of new user experience tweaks to be sure, but all of your existing content should “just work.”
We’re really pleased with the velocity that we’re seeing on this work so far, and we’re still on track to release the Beta for Pro Users by the end of Q1 2024. We’ll announce a firm Beta date sometime in the next couple of weeks so you can start planning your first Jumpgate play session!
Let’s show off a few of the things we’ve been working on in the meantime:
Rinse and Repeat
Roll20 has had a basic undo feature for a long time now, but there are a few things about it that we’d like to improve. First off, it would be nice if you could undo and redo! The better our support for undo and redo is, the more confidently you can work on your game prep without worrying about making a small mistake. Step forward and backward through your changes so you can dither between adding 3 goblins or maybe 6 to that little forest ambush – we won’t tell your players you almost gave them a break, don’t worry.
In addition to that, Roll20 GMs often switch between pages while making changes to multiple scenes. Pressing undo after you change a page and having weird stuff happen on that page isn’t a great experience, so now our undo and redo system will keep track of the page that you’re on while you make changes – so you can add some tokens to a page, come back to that page later during the same session, and your undo and redo stack will still be intact.
It’s All About Context
One of the features used the most on Roll20 is the context menu – that’s the menu that appears when you right-click on the tabletop or an object and gives you options on what you can do with it. We’ve redesigned this menu as part of Jumpgate to bring it up to our modern design standards. We’re also taking this opportunity to consider what options should be shown at what times to help be a little smarter about what you need at your fingertips.
In addition to that, the context menu now supports performing more actions on a group of tokens all at once! So you can select a group of tokens, right-click and lock all of their positions, without needing to do it to each token individually. We’re also smarter about what to do with groups of mixed object types.
For example, if you select a group of tokens and happen to also select a drawing in the mix, you can still right click on the group and hit Add Turn and we’ll add a turn just for the tokens and ignore the drawings you selected. Overall, this makes group selection actions much more useful in Jumpgate.
Let’s Talk Touch
While Roll20 is primarily a desktop web application, we want to support GMs and players using any device they have access to wherever they are when they want to play their game. That’s why we’re spending time in Jumpgate to make sure that touch interactions are a first-class citizen on the VTT.
Notice how smoothly you can zoom in and out with two fingers and pan the map around. In addition to that, we’re examining interactions like placing text and activating the context menu to make sure that they’re fully supported and not frustrating to use.
Our goal is that by the time Jumpgate fully launches out of Beta, you can play a Roll20 game on a tablet device and have a great experience delving dungeons. And the best part is that this is all just running right in the web browser – you don’t have to download a separate app.
Well, that’s it for today’s update on Jumpgate. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks with more. Until then, happy gaming!