ProFantasy software is a small company, but our network of contributors is incredibly international ranging from part-time editors in Australia through freelance artists in Germany and Sweden to shipping and programming in the US. While the headquarters and office are in London, much of the day-to-day work is done from a small town in Germany. To give you a little insight what goes on at that German ProFantasy office, I am starting this column on the RPGMaps blog where I intend to five you a monthly status update on what is on this cartographer’s desk at the time. I hope you enjoy it, and feel free to ask any questions in the comments or over at the community forum.

Spiel’15 in Essen, the big boardgaming fair, definitely dominated the first half of October, meaning I was out of the office for a week. Prior to that, helpers had to be organized, stock brought in and assembled, and my absence to be planned for. You can read up on my time at Spiel here. Let me just say that it’s always fun, but also a very exhausting affair. Back from Essen, I was busy with putting material back into storage, settling the accounts and reporting back to HQ. Unfortunately I brought a stubborn cold back with me, which took the whole next week to leave my system. Crowds are dangerous!

Next up on the desk was getting out the CC3+ compatibility update for Symbol Set 3 – Modern. This also required preparing the next update for CC3+ (version 3.69). While the majority of work, like beta-testing and building the installations, had been done before Spiel, I still had some fine-tuning to do and the actual release to prepare. As I type this, SS3 and Update 3 should be safely out and available to our users.

But the big thing lurking on my desk is another beast: Perspectives 3. After Spiel I dived back into assembling catalogs, fine-tuning symbols, creating varicolors and all such things for an add-on with thousands of symbols. I’m currently producing a rough working version, so we can tackle some necessary programming work that using isometric bitmap artwork entails.

As you can see from the little sample, Perspectives 3 will not have one, but two new bitmap artwork styles – doubling the symbol work, yay! What you can’t see is that one styles will also have 8 directional views for each symbol, instead of the 4 in Perspectives Pro. Even more, yay! Hopefully next month the cartographer will have a couple more elaborate samples of Perspectives 3 on his desk. Until then!