Evan Newton's page

Hi All,

Please read the Job Description below and send us an application if interested!
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Trapdoor Technologies has need of an experienced Content Editing professional to help us digitally publish the most popular Tabletop Roleplaying game in the world. We are seeking an exceptional human (or cylon) to provide an unparalleled eye for detail and communication as we ramp up our publication schedule.

This is a remote job. We are a distributed team - jammie pants optional, internet connection required.

About Us:

Trapdoor Technologies is a Boulder, CO-based pioneer in enhanced digital publishing software. Our primary directive is to build a publishing platform specifically designed for 21st century needs. Our flagship product, The Story Machine™, is a scalable, automated, cloud-based publishing engine offering integrated interactive features for digital books, documents and periodicals.

Currently, we are using our technology to build the ultimate digital toolset and publishing platform for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Playbook for Pathfinder.

About You:

You love roleplaying games and can easily get into the minutiae of the rules. You notice when published books have editing mistakes and it makes you seethe inside when you can’t get it corrected. You LOVE reading and playing with words. You are also good with technology and love to build great products. It’s really a shame we haven’t moved past PDF’s yet in tabletop gaming.

Must-haves:

- Authority on Pathfinder – You probably know the prerequisites for all core prestige classes. You’ve GM’ed at least a year and can speak from experience.
- Eye for Detail - Misspelled words and typos glare out at you like sore thumbs. You also know how to tell the difference between the Fly spell and the Fly skill in context of the text.
- Communication - You are concise and direct in communication. You have no problems building an excel sheet to whatever level of detail needed. Email ninja skills are critical.
- Avid Reader - You go through a couple books a week. Stories are your jam.
- Technology Skills - We are a software company and as it turns out, we use a lot of software. You need to be familiar with iPad tablet and web browsing paradigms. You’ve spent some time in a database or two.
- Work from Home - We are a distributed team. You must have access to a phone, computer, and reliable internet. You must also be self-motivated and not require someone to look over your shoulder to make sure work gets done.

Bonus XP:
- Digital Product experience - You’ve built digital products before or have been involved enough to know what the process is like.
- Member of the Pathfinder Society
- You’ve found at least one typo in this job description
- Colorado-based

Please send BOTH a cover letter and updated resume including references to jobs@trapdoortechnologies.com. Applications sent without a cover letter will not be considered. In your cover letter, tell us about yourself. Tell us what you’re into, what inspires you, and why this is something you want to do.

Hey All --

We're continuing to work on building new partnerships for our toolset. Mike Schley is on board to help build our map system.

Exploding Rogue Studios will be building Karthun with us as well!

The vision for Morningstar is still very bright. Check us out, pledge, and tell your friends!

Codename: Morningstar Kickstarter

We have more updates on the way :).

I also have a question about the pricing. I've seen several kickstarters where if a certain stretch goal was met, the product would be offered for free. Wouldn't Morningstar pay for itself after 400,000? What am I missing? The work of keeping it up-to-date with new releases, maybe?

Morningstar is essentially being offered for free to backers who buy in at different Tiers :). But to answer your question, yes. We are treating Morningstar as a store and live service that will improve ongoingly as time continues.

I watched the video and it looks really cool and I wish yall the best of luck.

I do have a question, if I was to buy a 3pp pdf and wanted it incorporated in my game, how would Morningstar handle the custom rules?

Again, it looks very cool and good luck.

Thanks!

Well, so we are striving for a system that will help provide information. If you have a 3pp set of rules and you want to incorporate them in, you could conceivably tweak the homebrew settings for mechanics changes. Right away, we won't have support for every possible Pathfinder ruleset or 3pp supplement right away. It's going to take some time to get there.

In the meantime though, you will be able to easily manage your advantures as a GM. For GM's, it is an invaluable resource for prepping and managing games, saving them where you leave off, and being able to share/sync/message your players.

One issue with Realm Works is that there is no good way to get your content back out of the application. Will Morningstar have data export options?

Yep. Morningstar will have both sharing and export features. You can export to an epub or pdf file, and print as you like. The reason this works so well with Morningstar is that we show all content through a digital book format. It's as easy as hitting "Print." or "Save."

How much do you anticipate the full product to cost?

We're working out pricing, but the product will be free to download. The cost will come from downloading content for use in the app or purchasing the fully featured content creation suite (which will be how you publish your content.)

How much will the monthly subscription be?

I can say it will be very cheap. We're doing both a subscription or a buyout option.

Are you going to cover the full range of tablet operating systems?

We're going for iOS, Android, and Web right now...but we've had requests for Kindle and MS Surface too. So, yes, if there's enough demand :).

Can it be used on a desktop or laptop computer?

Yes, through a web browser right now. But we are looking at native support as well.

How much of the coding is already done?

The app was built for D&D 5E purely as a way to distribute WotC's content. So the platform is essentially finished for that purpose (on the iOS side). The Kickstarter is for rebuilding the publishing engine to be a consumer platform, as well as ripping out all the 5e rules and putting in the PRD.

Why didn't this end up for D&D 5th ed, as originally planned?

Well, I can't go into extreme detail, but Trapdoor is a digital publishing company. Our goal has always been to make information easy to use and accessible in a way that is intuitive for people used to physical books. We split with WotC based on differences in vision for the product. There really was no foul play in terms of missing deadlines or quality issues.

Here's a little UI overview to give you guys a quick look at some of the functions of the app.

Youtube.

I wish you luck, but I seriously doubt that you're going to be able to raise $425,000 on Kickstarter for something like this. What are you going to do if it doesn't reach your funding goal?

Well, we'll go back to doing enterprise publishing. It's a swing for the fences, for sure, but to be clear, we're creating a consumer publishing and distribution platform with an integrated ruleset. Not trivial :).

Hi Everybody,

I'm the producer for a new (and awesome) cloud-based toolset designed for Web and iOS/Android tablets. It's a very robust and clean solution that makes gaming at the table fun and easy.

We're using the PRD to start–and we've taken a slightly different approach than other toolsets in the field. Here are some highlights:

- Create and publish your adventures/campaign settings for your friends or the world at large.
- End-to-end support for tabletop gaming via tablet. GM adventures, manage character sheets, share information, save a logbook, and create/edit content.
- An unprecedented attention to design aesthetic in tabletop tools.

Check us out here.

I'm happy to answer any other questions here!