Overseer Studio is a digital game master screen.
The architecture of Overseer Studio closely follows my personal development philosophies and design best practices. It’s some of the best code I’ve ever written and more importantly it solves a real problem that I’ve never seen addressed before.
I don’t really have an agenda for this post but I wanted to ramble about some of the choices I made when building Overseer Studio.
Before we dive in, I think it’s important to discuss what influenced Overseer and the current landscape of digital tabletop roleplaying tools.
Back in 2017 when I started Astral TableTop (previously known as Power VTT), I was exploring a market where Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds were the only serious TTRPG tools in the space. By serious I mean these tools were estimated to be making upwards of $1mm+ a year. Both Foundry VTT and D&D Beyond hadn’t been founded yet and so the barrier-to-entry for a new tool was low. This was also pre-pandemic so the pop culture explosion of Stranger Things and Dungeons & Dragons also hadn’t happened yet.
Today, the once blue ocean of virtual tabletops (VTTs) is now a blood-red ocean of fierce competition. My hypothesis is, during the pandemic, a lot of smart and creative people tried to solve their own unique problems playing TTRPGs online and saw an opportunity to make money doing so; some more successfully than others.
Unfortunately, every new contender I’ve seen enter the space tries to cannibalize existing market shares without truly innovating or building anything new. No one is trying to build something different. It’s just all the same base set of features with the promise of being easier.
This is a huge problem for a couple reasons.
99% of GMs have the tools they like to use and don’t have a hunger to switch to something else. When Foundry VTT came around, people were itching for something better than Roll20 (though to Roll20’s credit, they’ve done an insanely good job catching back up to Foundry VTT.)
With the rare exception of Foundry VTT, GMs and players don’t want to learn new tools. They want to use what they know and what they’re comfortable with. The barrier-to-entry for a new tool is incredibly high these days. If you want advice on how to launch a new TTRPG tool, the best I can give you is: don’t (unless you’re doing something truly revolutionary - and I don’t mean AI.)
Subscription as a service (SaaS) will continue to exist but I have a feeling they will start to become less and less popular for TTRPGs as people become more aware of the costs and the lack of value they’re getting.
People are tired of paying monthly for a service that the average player uses once or twice a month. (Note: average)
If I’m being honest, I’m tired of them too. No one likes an outage during game time and I hate being held liable for it.
Running a SaaS company is a ton of work and I just don’t have it in me anymore to keep up with server demands, budgeting breakdowns, cost analysis, and all the other things that come with running a 24/7 online business. Not to mention the constant pressure to keep up with user demands. It’s all on me to develop, deploy, and keep users and publishers happy. The chase is constant, which brings me to my final point.
I saw Foundry VTT explode in popularity over Astral TableTop and I believe a huge reason was the community. Their community was able to build plugins and solutions to problems better and faster than I ever could have.
The only way I see a new TTRPG tool succeeding in today’s market is by leveraging the power of a developing community. It takes the burden off of you to develop solutions to each and every feature, it opens up a market to others to make money selling plugins (if developers want), and it keeps people engaged and invested in the project.
I get it. The digital TTRPG market is tough, users are happy with their tools, and the bar is high. Let’s move on.
Why build Overseer Studio at all if you feel this way?
I don’t see Overseer Studio as a new digital TTRPG tool. Instead, Overseer makes using the tools you love today easier to manage during a session.
If you’re a Roll20 fanatic, Overseer is for you.
If you’re a die-hard Foundry VTT user, Overseer is for you.
If you’re constantly switching browser tabs, PDFs, music players, streaming windows, and more - Overseer was built for you.
If you miss the feeling of having a physical screen in front of you while running a game, Overseer was built for you.
In a lot of ways, Overseer is the solution to all the problems I listed above in the digital TTRPG market. It’s a one-time purchase desktop application, it has unlimited potential for expansion with community plugins, and it doesn’t try to cannabalize existing tools. Instead of trying to convince GMs and players to learn something new, Overseer encourages GMs to use what they love and integrate it to streamline their workflow.
Even with a good VTT, a GM will juggle windows and physical notebooks. Overseer is an attempt to to limit that juggling because when you’re running a game, you want to focus on the roleplaying and worldbuilding; not which window had which information.
Overseer will be released when it’s done.
I know that’s cliche and silly to say but unlike my other projects which had no clear definition of “finished”, Overseer isn’t being built as an MVP that promises to expand based on user feedback. Overseer will be released as a fully functional application that can be expanded upon by the community.
To be clear, that doesn’t mean Overseer will be perfect and won’t have updates along the way - it absolutely will.
But unlike SaaS platforms, there is a fine line in the sand I can draw and say, “it’s finished.” There is a clear goal I can define for myself and interested users that solves this unaddressed problem in the digital TTRPG space.
It personally feels rejuvenating that there is an end goal in sight and I can’t wait to share it with you all.
Speaking of, go request early access to Overseer at overseer.studio or join the Overseer discord to chat with me and the community!
Thanks for reading.