Dungeon Maker has been a passion project of mine for the last year and a half. It’s a map maker and multiplayer campaign manager for DnD 5e.
The program features a robust encounter map maker and map exporter for you to use your maps in any program you like. It also features a campaign maker where you can tie together encounter maps into a world map.
You can create enemies and NPCs and give them actions and spells to use in game. As the Dungeon Master you can take full control of these characters and enemies during your campaigns.
It features full multiplayer, with a character creator for your players, dynamic lighting, an encounter tracker, animated actions, automatic dice rolls, and more.
I would love for you to check out Dungeon Maker on Steam.
Seems promising!
So this is the question I tend to ask, if nothing else to learn something about your tool. Why should it use it over more established competitors? I am specifically thinking something like Roll20 and FoundryVTT, the former being easily accessible and free with SRD content at your fingertips, and Foundry just being, well, Foundry. Hell even Owlbear Rodeo for a generic and easily accessible tabletop. For campaign management text programs like Notion.so and full on world managers like World Anvil are providing massively powerful tools too.
What it is Dungeon Maker provides that is either missing from these other options and is so useful that losing out on all the other stuff in them is worth the switch, or what does Dungeon Maker do so much better than the others that it is worth switching?
Not trying to be a jerk about it, it looks like you have a solid base, just curious about your ideas on these things.
Of course, I made Dungeon maker because I found being a player on Roll20 was a pretty lackluster experience (and not entirely free, my DM friend spent a lot of money on it). I can’t speak to how exactly it compares to other alternatives as I haven’t used many, so I can just talk about what it does do and let you decide if it sounds good.
Dungeon Maker comes with an intuitive tile based map editor for making encounters, including random map generators that can give you a starting point for your maps. It automatically creates barriers to movement and vision with placed objects and walls so you don’t have to worry about that. It supports multi-story maps, allowing you to go vertical with your design, whether that be ,multiple stories to buildings, or perhaps cliff faces. There’s also built in note tools you can use to place notes anywhere on your maps, teleporters that will instantly move players and NPCs that step on them, hidden doors, toggleable lights, and more.
The built in asset editor lets you add custom art to the map, so you can change up the art style of the game, or just add custom objects.
The campaign map mode allows you to easily tie together your campaign maps into one place between encounters that your players can move freely around.
The lighting system lets you change the time of day on your maps during play, and the in game lighting will reflect that. You can toggle any light source on and off, allowing you to make fun and interesting scenarios for your players, such as stealth missions. The DM has the standard abilities to control enemies and NPCs, move players around, toggle door locks and open and close doors. They can also add enemies and NPCs to maps on the fly, so you can change up your encounters quickly and easily. There’s also a built in battle tracker to handle turn order and initiative automatically.
There is an action and spell editor in the game that lets you create most damage and healing based spells in DnD. Spells are animated in the game, which adds some flair to your encounters, and lets everyone see exactly where they went off. There’s also support for duration spells, and moving them around.
There is Steam Workshop support, so you can share your characters, NPCs, Enemies, Campaigns, Map Blueprints, and Custom Assets with other players.
Overall I’ve found it makes being a DM easy and fun, and my players have enjoyed using it. Hopefully it sounds good to you.
The map making and map exporting might be worth it for me, I’ll defo wishlist it! One of the things I am noticing is that a lot of the features you got overlap with the software I already use (FoundryVTT) and between already having DungeonDraft and Dungeon Alchemist. It’s a hard space to break in to and I do honestly wish you the best.
The Workshop support is interesting, though I am guessing from your description that so far, it won’t come even close to rival the module support that something like Foundry has.
You price point is very good though. Could be a solid entry point for a lot of GMs that want to get off Roll20. Oh yeah one thing that is not super clear from the Steam page as well is, does only the GM need to purchase the software or do players need their own copy too?
It’s definitely a crowded space, I’m hoping the combination of features lets me carve out a niche.
And everyone does need to purchase it, that’s why I’ve kept the price point low.
I forgot to mention, the map maker also includes a map exporter, so if you want to use Dungeon maker to make map sheets to either print out maps or use them in other programs you absolutely can.
Nice looking app! I see it’s specialized for 5e. Is it usable for other systems? (I’m primarily an OSR guy)
You can still build maps and use the multiplayer for any system, but you will have to use the manual dice rolls included in the program and manually edit health for those systems right now, since the back end rolls for actions and saving throws use 5e rules.
I do hope to add other ruleset support, but it took me a few months just to get the 5e rules mostly working, so it will be a while before other rulesets are fully supported.
Picked up a copy. Thanks for making affordable table top tools! Best of luck with your project!
Awesome, thank you for your support!
Here’s a link to Dungeon Maker’s Steam page:
Would you consider it feature complete or do you have plans for further updates?
I do plan on further updates, but I consider it at the point where it’s got enough features and works well enough to release. I’m also open to adding suggested features from users (and have been doing so when it was in early access).
