Finally

1.16 is out.

Which means one thing:

CUSTOM TILE SETS!

So get to work. Make sure the images you upload to your tablet are 128x128. Read the instructions in the text file.

If you have an issue with the scroll bar selection on the right after entering in custom tiles it's caused when you told the program to look for a texture and it can't find it. So, check the folder to see if it's there. Check the spelling to make sure it matches completely.

P.s.: I'd love to see your work!

Good night, it's late!

1.15 In Beta

I have 1.15 in Beta, a first for Dungeon Mapper.

We're testing out custom tile features to make sure everyone is looking good. This means that soon you'll be able to use your own textures to make dungeons.

If you already have Dungeon Mapper please take this survey to further the development: http://goo.gl/forms/8iyYIdizcj

New update 1.14

The update gives the user the option to turn off screenshots. When screenshots are on, the new screenshots will be five times that of the old screenshots. This will be more taxing for your device, and might take longer, but will be more useful for printing on to paper or posters. Screenshots will turn out to be roughly 15 mb in size per screenshot now.

I would show examples but they blogger wouldn't be able to properly show the differences. Just know that you can zoom much, much more before losing fidelity.

A few different dungeons, a few different tile sets

Using the Clean Stone tile set to show off a few of the unusual tiles

Another randomly designed dungeon using the Mud Stone tile set

Mixing the Clean Stone and Mossy Stone tile sets for effect. Careful of mold!

The Graphics Update

I've already uploaded a new update available to everyone (for free!) that includes five new tile sets to play around with.

As you can see, they're pretty generic fantasy dungeon tiles. Hopefully I did a decent job of balancing the grid overlay for the different tile sets. The "Rough Stone" set has a much darker grid because of the darker background, especially compared to the "Mud Stone" set at the bottom.

It looks good. Curved walls, Diagonal Walls, and all the goodness in between.

As usual, you can still get a tile count if you're using these for a real life build blueprint. I'm afraid that the font may be a little hard to read on some devices. I'm going to have to give this feature an update at some point.

(Known Bug: When you use a lot of tiles the list keeps going down until it goes off screen. Presumably, it keeps going!)



I know this had to be something everyone was looking forward to, and I hope this satisfies many of my customers. Thank you for your support!

Another Example Dungeon

I think it's difficult to explain what exactly you can do with the Dungeon Mapper app. The best way, I think, is to explain by example.

I've created a small dungeon experience that I'm not personally likely to use for any of my games but I've taken steps while making it so that it's a very "real" dungeon. I've gone through the same thought processes I would normally for making a dungeon like, "Start here, end there. Interesting terrain and trap there."

However, this time, I've added a couple more prerequisites to the process: use all of the tiles available currently in the abstract tile set and go crazy with the layout.

As you know, dungeons aren't always boxes connected by rectangles. I'm aware of that and Dungeon Mapper is capable of making dungeons more interesting for your Dungeons and Dragons, GURPS or what ever other square based system you're using.

So let's talk about the dungeon.

Starting from the bottom of the dungeon we head Down (or Up, as the arrows really don't mean anything unless your group has a standard in place). Right away you might notice that the walls are "thicker". This is done by starting the path with a corridor piece and, on both sides, having corners to make the rooms on either side. I could have avoided this by placing just floors on the other side. 

After proceeding down we're met by a fork and mirrored hallways. At the end of these hall ways I placed a "four corners" piece that acts as pillars; this piece fills in gaps left by perpendicular walls and gives the appearance of pillars. It gives a subtle difference in the appearance that in almost all cases will not impact actual game play.

This hallway is met by a door to a small room and another hallway leading up to a grand room. The grand room is 16 (whole) squares wide or 80 feet in D&D measurement. (Remember, the tile setup, 2"x2", was designed after seeing Dwarven Forge 3d gaming tiles because of their versatility.) Additionally, the room is more than 45 feet deep. Quite the room for some epic battles. The room even has a few cubby holes for sneak attacks.

This dungeon's grand room leads to a diagonal stairway down into a final room that would likely hold some plot information. The player(s) fulfilling the role of thief may be lucky enough to find a secret (and trapped) hallway leading to great rewards.

Wrapping this up

I'd imagine that most people expect the app to be able to make simple dungeons. I want them to know it can handle unusual shapes, too.

Please, leave any comments (about this write up, or the app) or questions here at the blog.

As always, don't forget to rate the app itself on the Play store. So far, two people have rated the app (both at 5 stars!). Do you agree with them?

July 11th Update

At 1 AM I pushed the 1.09 update to Google. Over the next few hours everyone should receive the ability to add text to their dungeon.

Update (as listed on store):

New Feature (As Requested by a User!):

You can now place text on the dungeon map. Placing text is pretty straight forward.

Select the Text icon ("T" button).
Tap where you want to place it.
Change the field as you want (in example: Secret Entrance)
Rotate if desired (Admittedly, if you want to rotate the text it will take some practice!).

Deleting the text works similarly to any other tile (Have "T" and "X" on simultaneously).


I was excited to have time to work on this and just as eager to get out the feature request. I don't foresee any bugs with this but that's the nature of bugs I suppose. I had the idea of setting font size and color (both limited because of touch interface) but I decided to push this out as is to make a splash. If there's still desire for larger/smaller or different colored text I'll definitely look into it.

Please, comments and criticism welcome. Feature requests always taken seriously and will strongly influence what I add next.

I'm leaning on looking at "Fog of War" type stuff and working my way towards an "online" solution with sharing tables live.

About That Previous Update...

Users may have noticed that I changed the "table" tile to be darker and added the option to make it even darker. Aside from saving battery life I originally made the change to save my eyes. I found myself making maps more often at night but it helps provide contrast against the abstract and snow cave backgrounds.

Any comments on the change is welcome.

A Goblin's Abode

"You venture into a cavern chisieled out by element and goblin alike. Their filth fills the air and what little space is between the each bed roll. Clearly, this is the common area."

Diagonal Stairs in Use

This is the screen capture I made after creating my first dungeon with stairs. I really like the way I can rotate the stairs to meet a diagonal corner in a room -- making my own way to a stage or platform. The bold black lines typically represent impassable walls, but I think with the obvious distinction with stairs my players will know they can make their way up there.



Overall, I feel like I've added another dimension to making new dungeons.

New Update

New Detail Tile:
Abstract - Single Stair
New Feature:
Rotate detail tiles by 45 degrees or 90 degrees. (Toggle-able in Options menu). Used for diagonal stairs (See new screenshot)
Bug Fix:
Corner tiles were recalculating their location after being loaded. The result ended up being that corner tiles that were rotated after being placed did not keep their rotation after being loaded.
Fixed detail objects sliding to the center of tiles after saving.
I apologize if either bug had effected you.

Slowly but surely adding the details to improve the functionality of the app. No pun intended.

Bug Fix

Some how during my (admission: brief) testing period with new tiles I had let a tiny bug slip through that caused some pretty devastating effects to the loading process. Simply put, if tiles were after the "four corner" tile in the save file they had a relatively high chance to not load.


This bug has now been fixed, and any save files will work as intended.

The application reads the tile in a human readable format and the save format hasn't changed. However, be aware that if you saved a dungeon with this error, loaded it back up, and tried to fix it by replacing those tiles you may have overlapping tiles. If you did not do this, there's no need to take any action. If you did, either delete those tiles and try again or remove duplicates in the save file (the latter being very unnecessary, but I like to remind people they have the option of editing the save file).

I apologize if this error had negatively impacted anyone's experience.

Youtube Video

I just finished publishing a youtube video quickly demonstrating most of the features for the app.

It's found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY1BvfcrJJw&feature=youtu.be

The video was recorded through a webcam so the quality is pretty poor. I'm still looking into alternatives for video capture. However, I think it still demonstrates how quickly you can assemble a dungeon, or tear one apart if mistakes are made. I also switch between the Tile mode and Detail mode.

Please, report any bugs, feedback or feature requests here or on the App store.

I only have ONE review on the Play Store and I'm looking for more honest opinions!

The Most Recent Update (But Not the Last!)

The play store should read something like:

New Feature:

Implementation of Detail objects.

There's a new button at the button of the sidebar that will switch between your "tile" objects (the old dungeon building types) and the "detail" objects (mostly decor).

Right now, these pieces are only colored diamond shapes that will allow you to place markers atop your background tiles. You can only interact with the corresponding tiles while inside of this mode! Example: you can only delete tiles while in tile object mode.

This means I've got the ground work laid for the detail or decor items. Things like stairs, treasure chests and bookshelves are all a step closer with this. At the moment, I've simply given everyone the ability to mark, with generic diamonds, things on their maps. This will let architects do a number of things: mark specific locations, "draw out" shapes for features (wells filled with blood, a crater, etc.) or any other use you might imagine. They're generic, after all and they can mean what ever you need them to mean.

However, because they're generic, by the time I'm done adding all of the features you may not want generic tiles. With this in mind, it's possible to turn off generic detail items in the options menu. Just tap once and the app will remember for as long as it's installed on your device. It's worth noting that the only decor items are generic, so if you disable it now you wont see anything!

I've tried my best to make the interface as intuitive as possible. I don't gray anything out while you're in decor mode, but some things don't function the same way. Most modes automatically turn off when you switch modes and the bucket fill wont work while you're in decor mode. 

If you're having any difficulty with placing or removing tiles or decor please double check your tile mode!

If this is your first visit here, please check out my Dungeon Mapper application for android systems: Dungeon Mapper

Two Updates Later

So far I've only added a few small details to the app: End Cap, Passage and Four Corner abstract tile pieces.

Small tiles but very useful in building complex and varying dungeons.

I plan to start work on detail items like treasure chests and crates this week.

It's been done

I just pressed the button to publish the Dungeon Mapper application out to the world. It will take many hours for it to fully propagate through out Google's systems, but soon it will be available to everyone.

Pick it up for $3.99. 

This app features no ads and no in app purchases. What you see is what you get, here. I do plan on adding several more tile sets and more individual tiles for free. Please, take a look at it and offer me your thoughts on where it's at!

An Update on Progress

Dungeon Mapper is coming along swimmingly. At the moment I'm working to make it much more user friendly by adding confirmation windows to prevent accidentally deleting your hard work on accident.

I'm looking to do a final look around the entire app and see what I can improve upon in the user interface. All the bells and whistles you could ever want wouldn't do you any good if you didn't know how to use them!

Dungeon Mapper - An Old Frontier

This post is in preparation of the soon to be released "Dungeon Mapper" application on the Google Play Store.

Dungeon Mapper will assist those who partake in Table Top gaming in bringing their game to a new age. Dungeon Mapper, because of it's platform (Mobile, touch screen) provides ease of use, access and incredible technology to share your creations.

With Android* you can share your screen with another device or on your TV to display your dungeon like never before.

Build your dungeon using a variety of tile sets to change the scenery your gamers trek through.

• The abstract tile set is designed to be a catch all tile set--use this to make your dungeon printer friendly, or if there isn't another tile set suitable.
• The grass tile set takes place in a green plains area, and provides basic tiles.
• The snow tile set moves your players through a frigid area. Suitable for exterior snowy deserts or the frozen interior of an unexplored cave.
• More to come.

Build your dungeon with a variety of tools. Take advantage of the touch interface by swiping to "paint" tiles, or the bucket fill icon to flood an empty room with floors. And when you're done? Check the information stats and see how many tiles were needed (and of what type) in the event you want to use 3d terrain (such as Dwarven Forge). No dungeon would be complete without saving your results, and for your amusement, Dungeon Mapper automatically stores a screen shot of the dungeon when you save. Print, email or share your screen shot any way you'd like**

*Limited by device restrictions.
**Another program recommended to easily browse and share these screen shots.