Our record breaking September community vote is now over. We were sadly just shy of the 100 ballot mark, but we are thrilled by the increased participation! Our Patrons and Subscribers decided that the focus for September 2020 will be a new way to visualize relations.

Relation Visualiser

During our August Q&A, a community member asked about plans to make relations viewable in a web format. Long story short, I tried doing it two years ago and didn’t manage, and got discouraged by that feature since.

Fast forward a few days, and our fantastic community member Guardian demonstrated a working prototype of the feature! Someone did the difficult first step of finding a library that renders things in a useful manner, and I’m very grateful to him for it.

Now that this option prevailed in the community vote, boosted campaigns will soon be create and view a graph of their entity’s relationships. Family and organisation memberships will also be getting a viewing upgrade this month. If possible, the visualizer will be expanded to include any type of link between entities – for example, a character’s location or a race and its subraces. However, the technical feasibility of this last goal is unclear, especially when accounting for large campaigns.

Other plans for September

August saw three massive updates, each adding functionality to Kanka that had been wished for for a while. This is possible thanks to the community’s support through Subscriptions, allowing me and Jon to work full time on Kanka!

We hope to start holding worldbuilding events during September, and I’ll be building some features in the app for that. We are also going to continue adding value to campaign boosters with options to have complete change logs on entities, more entity files, and a campaign gallery.

We are also going to be expanding on the success of our August Q&A, and hosting a second one on the 13th of September!

Continuing Project Freyja

Plans to continue Project Freyja are also well under way, with our designer hard at work figuring out how to cram huge amounts of information and options in a way that makes sense for existing and new users.

But Project Freyja isn’t only about visuals but also about workflow, and we’ll be improving the workflow for Maps and Timelines this month.