Arcane Table – Natthan Senteni

SoloProject: Arcane Table VTT
Status: Prototype
Creation Date: 2020
System: Unity Engine - WebGL

Project Description

The Arcane Table project is born from a feeling of despair in the face of the Virtual TableTop industry. When the Covid lockdown happened and my Pathfinder group was forced to move our campaigns online, I decided the options available at the time were not up to modern standards and decided to do something about it. The project was unfortunately cancelled a few months later due to licensing issues and the apparition of solid competitors announced.

Development Stage and Existing Systems

The prototype got to a stage where most of the vital systems were in place on the Game Master side of things. A Game Master can create templates of creatures (Tokens), which are converted to JSON for easy storage. These Tokens can be found in a library, on the left side panel, and dragged on the map to create singular instances of the creature (Units), where a snap grid awaits them. From that point on, the Unit is registered and memorized by the UnitController, responds to calls like Roll Initiative for All and can received buffs, debuffs and damage as an independant entity.

Just like Tokens, map templates can be added by the Game Master to a library, to be created as battlemaps. Once a battlemap is created, it receives a snap grid, gets added to the map thumbnail UI bar, from which all users can navigate from one existing map to another. Exisiting Units are children of the battlemap, making it effectively tied to this location, allowing for multiple combat to happen at once without confusion.

The system is structured around controllers (RollManager, GameEventManager and a UnitController, among others) listening to delegate calls. It was also built in prevision of using Mirror Networking for the multiplayer functionality, primarily because at the time it was one of the few supporting WebGL out of the box, for which a prototype was also created.