Welcome to Gloomhaven Story Tracker!!
What is Gloomhaven? Gloomhaven is a "euro-inspired" board game of "tactical combat." Every game has the players, who each control a mercinary based out of the mythical town of Gloomhaven, work together cooperatively to fight bandits and demons and other denizens of the setting in which the game takes place. Gloomhaven is a legacy-style game, where players group together in parties, play through a story-line and side quests, and decisions can "perminantly" alter which locations and options are available to the characters. Also, the game has almost 100 playable scenarios, each with its own place in the story line and various rewards and unlocks. These scenarios are linked together in as part of ever-branching story path that intertwine, in which parties have much freedom in which order they unlock and complete scenarios in.
What is the problem that needs to be solved? Because of its complexity and 100's of hours of available gameplay, Gloomhaven players need a way to keep track many things: the party stats, the monsterAI, the running of an individua game, and which locations have been completed or are currently available to the party of players. There are mobile and web apps for all of these things. However, there are few satisfying options for players to keep track of the complex story development. It's easy to know that scenario 15 is unlocked, but without reading and re-reading the guide(with possible spoilers), it can be very difficult for group of players who meet only 2 or 3 times a month to remember why they would play scenario 15 thematically; how it was unlocked, where it fits in to the storyline, and even to which of the storyline paths does that scenario belong.
What is the solution this app provides? Enter the gloomhaven story tracking app! This app is designed to help players keep track of these very things. In particular, the app will come pre-loaded with a teaser for each playable scenario available to the party, that helps the players quickly remember where the story line fits into the grand scheme of things. Once attempted/completed, these teasers will be replaced on the location info screen to display summaries of the story intro or of the conclusion text respectively. Once completed, this location info screen will then display information about the rewards and unlocked scenarios that a player can complete with links to there location info screens or back to location info screen of the scenario that unlocked it. In this way the player can navigate from location to location in a particular story path to see the close-up details.
What about selecting which location to play next? Another primary feature of this app is that you can browse the unlocked/available scenarios and easily page through them to see the teaser for each of these scenarios along with info about the unlocking scenario, so that players have an easy to view context for selecting between the available scenarios. This is important because the in game solution to this problem is to look at a large map board full of marked off an unmarked stickers and to try to parse this information with no clear indication of the thematic links between scenarios or why you would choose one over the other. This feature can greatly ease this pain point of the game.
What about the bird's eye view of where a party is in the story? Outside of viewing the unlocked scenarios, players will be able to see a customizable history of everything they've accomplished thorughout their campaign and the order in which they did stuff. This can include information on global/party events, completed scenarios, npc's of importance, and major events in a party's evolution(e.g. the retirment of a character, or the unlocking of a new class type!) This list will auto-populate as the players input information about these events along the way.
What if I'm in the middle of a campaign? The app will include a wizard to easily import an existing campaign. Of course, some of the history may not be avaiable for things that you've done before the import, but the app will pick up with recording everything you do after you start recording events in the app, and other features will be made available instantaneously.