EliteMobs 7.2.16 public release & a retrospective of 2020

Hello Supporters!

As you've probably noticed, the Dungeon Packager alongside other new features are now live on the public build over at Spigot.

I'm going to take this opportunity to make a more meta post and look back at 2020.

This has certainly been a peculiar year. With everyone being stuck at home, I tried to put in the hours work on EliteMobs much as I could, and I think that it has been rather successful.

Perhaps this might be news for new supporters, but the first custom bosses were only added roughly one year ago, at the end of October 2019. The regional bosses were only added in January! 11 months later and we have a full on distribution system in place, and one that doesn't seem to be half bad at that!

Over the past year, I've published 8 lairs/minidungeons, and currently have three more in the works, hoping to release one or two in January.

I have not tracked how many hours I've spent on EliteMobs over 2020, but I am certain it many would qualify them as far too much for what is still to this date mostly just a hobby.

2020's been the first year where I've really made a push for promoting Patreon, and the first real entry for that was the Pirate Ship minidungeon. As a result, pledge growth doubled and, as the catalog of minidungeons increases, I hope that the pledges too shall grow, allowing me to provide you with bigger, better and more elaborate minidungeons.

EliteMobs was, is and will continue to be a project developed by a single person. That being said, I would not have been able to provide you even a fraction of what I have in terms of both free and premium premade content without the help of Guus from the Realm of Lotheridon, Maldini and 69OzCanOfBepis. 

In the near future, I would really like to reach out to more dungeon content creators, as well as artists and video makers to try to elevate EliteMobs to the next level. If you can hook me up, please do so, I've not had much luck in these areas.

Maldini's also volunteered a great minidungeon map, which you can expect to be seeing soon as the first of its kind.

Zolth's contacted me for some promotion and video editing work. If you even know of any ways that EliteMobs could be promoted or ways that I could get good video makers to work on minidungeon trailers, that would be something I absolutely need right now. 

The trailers I create are perhaps better than nothing, but they are unable to truly capture the beauty in the design of these minidungeons or the fun that can be had in doing these encounters. I think I could do better if I spent more time making them, but it simply takes too much time. If you have a good solution for this issue, please let me know.

In the spirit of surpassing at least some of these obstacles, I have some news!

Today, I have assembled a team of two other people, at least one of which you've certainly heard of. 69OzCanOfBepis is now the official builder for EliteMobs. If you remember his name from the credits for the Dark Spire, the Sewer Maze, the North Pole and others, you will probably be quite happy to hear that he will be building and working on encounter design quite consistently for EliteMobs from this point on. 

Additionally, Sequacious has joined as a QA tester, something that I sorely needed as testing features and finding bugs often times takes more time than making the plugin. If you were lucky enough to be there, he was the voice on voice chat in some of the best streams I've done. His brand of brutally honest feedback will also keep me on track with whether a feature is good enough or not. With his help, I believe that EliteMobs will become a much smoother plugin to use. He may also be working on some special projects for EliteMobs soon.

Today, the future is looking bright for EliteMobs. These ambitious expansionist plans are only feasible because your support - literally. Without patreon, it is highly unlikely that EliteMobs would be on anything beyond a very basic maintenance mode at this point, if that.

I really enjoy working on these systems, and I enjoy even more seeing what people can come up with and reading your feedback on things. I hope that we will be able to keep this upward momentum and together take EliteMobs from a fairly good plugin to something truly special.

Happy adventuring!

- MagmaGuy