⏰ Clocks

🆕 Added a campaign clocks sheet! This has been on the list for a while, and I'm happy to finally land on a design I'm happy with. As part of the clocks overhaul, I also corrected silly oversights like finally including a 10-clock.

🔮 On the clocks sheet, you'll notice widgets that let you Ask the Oracle if a clock advances—and that it functions without macros or custom scripts! This bit of spreadsheet wizardry is new to my bag of tricks. For now, I'll just say that this proof of concept portends exciting upgrades to come... 🤐

🎨Layout

I designed this playkit for my personal adventures, which means that I'm constantly playtesting.  Each iteration is a reflection of fixes and tweaks I've made for my own games. Aesthetic design is always important for my user experience, so I can't help looking for ways to improve. 

For version 2.2, some minor layout improvements were made on the Starship, vows, and progress sheets. 

Vow & progress

As part of my clocks overhaul I took the opportunity to rearrange how they're presented on the vow and progress sheets. You'll notice that the clock now minimizes (instead of disappearing) when you collapse the clock column group. 

I also added some vertical separation between the "notes" row and the bottom of the clock section. Now, when you type long or multi-line notes (tip: alt + enter to insert a line break inside a cell), the bottom of the clock section doesn't awkwardly stretch downward for no reason. It bothered me, so I fixed it. 😎

Starship

On the Starship sheet, I changed the layout of the Module and Support Vehicle asset cards so that you can collapse all the way down to a single player overview without obstructing the assets in weird ways. As a frequent solo player, this was a welcome improvement. 

You'll also notice that I tightened up the default character count to 5, meaning that the average group will be able to jump in and start playing without having to hide as many sheets. (It still supports up to 8 players; just go to the View menu to unhide sheets.) 

I also made a big improvement to the readability of the Crew overview. I found myself struggling to parse the significance of all the horizontal bars at-a-glance. Rotating the stats section to column charts made a big difference as a way to visually differentiate between static values (stat arrays) and dynamic values (condition meters). This felt obvious in hindsight: health bars are usually just that (read: bars), whereas column charts are arranged like we're just to seeing stats on the character sheets (left to right). Now, I find it much easier to scan the Crew and see who has the highest Wits score, or who's in dire need of Recovery. 

💻 Performance

My goal with the Crew Sheet is for it to continually improve while remaining as usable as possible. It's a tool, so it shouldn't be frustrating to use or get in the way of gameplay. When the app slows down because it's thinking too hard, that's a problem. 

Google Sheets, like any program, has its limitations. Certain interactive features are more process-heavy than others (conditional formatting, custom scripts, etc), so keeping these under control is a must. For Version 2.2, I did a another "quality of life" review of each sheet to ensure that conditional formatting rules are as efficient as possible and there are no unnecessarily huge blocks of hidden rows taking up memory. 

❓ For the future, I'm considering developing a parallel "optimized" version of the Crew Sheet with minimal conditional formatting, helper functions, and zero custom scripts. In theory, this would make the sheet as snappy as possible, with the trade-off being a slight decrease in functionality. If an Optimized Crew Sheet is something you'd be interested in, leave a comment to let me know. 

🐛 Bug fixes

Bug: Supply values don't sync

Status: Fixed

For some reason, when Google Sheets files are copied, the attached Apps Script file is copied along with it —but not the triggers it contains. For this reason, some of you using previous versions of this spreadsheet may experience Supply values not syncing as expected. 

Rather than using assigned triggers, the Apps Scripts functions have been hard-coded as "simple triggers," which now function as intended even when the file is copied.