Mind-Mapping for RPG Campaign design and running.
I love love love Scapple, mind-mapping software from Literate and Latte, the makers of Scrivener (which is also awesome). I've been using it to design the latest adventure with my DnD group at work. There's a repo with notes and whatnot.
I've been outgrowing it though - I really want Scapple's amazingly simple UI along with an outline processor, along with some templates for things like NPCs or monster statblocks.
Kinda want Scapple cross-bred with Scrivener.
So, this is my (mostly incomplete) attempt of making such a tool before I
get distracted get a more pressing assignment.
Pain points during work:
- Paste text with nothing selected makes a new bubble at last click location. "here, I want a bubble. cmd-V"
- Easily add barriers to the right of everything
- Resize bubble while typing
- Find ("wait, what were the kind of mushrooms we found?")
- copy/paste/duplicate bubbles
- modifer-drag on barrier to not move anything
- search
- text field at top with search criteria
- maybe grow a sidebar with results
- key combo to move between them
- scroll to bubble when focused
- maybe return to original position when leaving search mode (for in-game note finding)
- maybe fade out bubbles without a match
- highlight the search text
- Fix the scroll area bounds
- Maybe a bit of overscroll at the edges
- resize bubble when entering text
- resize off the left side with a keypress
- More colors
- color assignable by keystroke
- moving barriers in an empty document makes them disappear
Working through a book club book (Building a Second Brain : https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com), thinking more of something like Borkle-styles as the locus of CODEing:
- Collect - vomit bubbles
- Organize - make explicit (link) and implicit (tag, position) connections
- Reduce - show/hide/layout based on relevance
- Express - Creating Value
Maybe something more tangible will chew its way out of my brain as we work through it.
- would be nice to be able to collapse a hieraerchy (essentially to-the Right/Down), but would also be nice to be able to have multiple sets of connection
- like a set of cats. One way to connect them is by breed (Böb: snowshoe, Rusty, Newton, Maggie: Calico), another by owner (Bork: Böb, Newton; Sharz: Böb, Rusty, Kassandra: Maggie). Would be nice to be able to have both of those possble, and show different slices (or maybe both at the same time - greyed lines, or something, or a 3-D projection)
- Would also be nice to be able to tag things and filter by tags, and also implicitly connect by tags. Visibility could be by tag too (say for D&D stuffs, have a DM view with :allTheThings:, and one that could be given to the players)
- Thinking in DoD, a table of tags with bubble ID references. Or a table per tag.
Might be fun to see the elvisloution over the years months weeks.
Imports Scapple documents and draws (crudely) the mindmap. The text field and flumph are opened and saved to figure out bundle documents.
Adds basic interaction - selecting bubbles (click / shift-click / command-click), dragging them around, mouse-motion highlight, scrolling, undo
Figured out how to measure text and get the bubble to resize itself vertically.
Hold down space to engage the grabbing hand for scrolling.
Click and drag in "space" to do a basic rubber band selection
Double-click in space to create a new bubble
Press Delete to remove bubles
Moving a barrier moves everything to the right, letting you make sections you can easily move stuff in bulk.
Shift-click-dragging in space adds to the current selection.
Double-click a bubble to edit its text.
Drag bubbles on top of another bubble to make (dis) connections
By default barriers move everything to their right. Which is what you want most of the time. Sometimes you want to move the barrier without affecting anything (say for precise positioning, or you've gotten a couple of accidental overlaps).
Hold down option when clicking on a barrier to prevent it from moving the bubbles and other barriers.
