DEMIPLANE
Table top roleplaying toolset
My Role
Senior Designer - Visual Design, Research, Prototyping, Design System
Team
Peter Romenesko - CEO & Co-Founder
Adam Bradford - CCO
Travis Howell - Senior Designer
Timeline
1.5 years
Overview
Demiplane is a complete remote table top gaming solution that connects players together to play while offering character creation tools and a store front for source book content.
During my time on the project I worked on the video & chat play interface along with the character creation system, pool dice rolling system, and the design system for branded homepages.
Demiplane has had an amazing reception by the community and has provided an excellent character tool set that made it easier to play table top role playing games.
Character Builder
Creating a character is an essential part of the tabletop role-playing experience. We started with the Pathfinder system as the foundation that would set forth a character creator who worked for all of our game systems and beyond.
Goals
Expandable across multiple IPs and game systems
Reduce character creation down to minutes
Maintain continuity of choices when backtracking
During our iteration process, we came up with many designs, the largest challenge was keeping continuity throughout the sheet as players could go back and make changes or choices later on during their creation process and to speed up what could take hours to do traditionally.
Our sheet was broken into 3 main sections. The creation process, choices you could make, then detailed information. This system worked well with our ability to theme for each brand. We worked closely with the Pathfinder community to hone in on this process and were able to get character creation down to minutes instead of hours
“This is the best character creator I’ve ever used”
Pathfinder Community Member
Dice Rolling
Travis and I each took on different aspects of the dice roller. While he was working on the general dice rolling mechanics I focused on the dice pool system for games that needed dice pooling. The unique challenge here is the ability for players to interact with the dice after they have been rolled.
Goals
Create a system for pool dice games
Allow users to interact with dice after they’ve been rolled
Create a system that can be branded easily
I focused on the game Vampire the Masquerade to unpack the pool dice mechanic into a system that worked well for all pool games. After some mockups and iterations through the interactions Travis and I came together to merge our two designed systems into a single dice roller that can serve any game style.
Along with the designs we had to deliver we wrote the detailed logic for each interaction and how it would expand for future game systems.
Character Sheets
Early on in the process, we worked to define a structure that would work for our character sheet system that could span multiple game systems and provide detailed rule snapshots when needed. During each game system, we broke down the rules of character creation and game mechanics so we might best understand what the players needed at any one time.
Goals
Most detailed information readily available
Get to rules in 3 or less clicks
Secondary information 1 click away
Talking with the player base we were able to come up with a system that offered players their key information at all times, secondary information within a click away, and finally detailed rules and mechanics with another click.
Along with making the character sheet dynamically update when things change on your character we also integrated automatic dice rolling.
During this process, we were able to achieve the most detailed information was just 3 or fewer clicks away, and make a sheet that worked responsively for players.
Nexus Pages
One of the last things I worked on was helping with the mult-tier design system which was required to roll out various brands and IPs across the system. Travis and I worked closely together to define each object needed and create a system that allowed us to roll out the design to a few key screens.
Goals
Quick brand launches
Minimal design effort when new brand launches
Scaleable system
These key screens helped the front-end team capture the vision, without us designing out every single screen. IPs need to be rolled out quickly so there wasn’t time in the roadmap for detailed designs. Our quick start design system helped us quickly apply brand and IP with minimal updates and helped the team get an IP launched with in weeks time.
Summary
Demiplane was an amazing product to work on and the team there is incredibly talented. During my time with them, I also worked on the player portal and video platform as well. With such an expansive platform there were a ton of opportunities to work on a variety of systems and features that all needed to be interchangeable depending on each IP launching.