It’s high time for a progress update to Wild Card Creator! Things are still right on track for a “plenty of time to make characters for Origins” release date, but I figured I’d give you a bit more information about where things are.

I recently shipped Beta 3 to testers. The big feature this time was character saving, which couldn’t be completed until recently because the actual character contents hadn’t been finalized. I fixed a couple dozen bugs reported in Beta 2 and now the bugs have become less prevalent. Beta 4 should be due out in about two weeks and will have some character exporting features in it, as well as several settings supported.

PDF importing is going very smoothly, although I’m discovering that every PDF seems to have at least one weird quirk that keeps it from being a breeze. Last night I was starting to support Hell on Earth Reloaded and found out that whenever I extracted text, all periods were bizarrely converted to the Unicode backspace character (basically, a text representation of when you type the backspace key, but without actually performing the backspace). Fortunately I’ve been able to figure out the problems like these and keep things going.

Some of you may be wondering about Savage Worlds Showdown support. As a huge fan myself, I would love to see a way to more easily make armies than the Excel spreadsheet. As the stretch goal states, support will be added after the initial release of Wild Card Creator. I’m debating right now whether or not to spin off Savage Worlds Showdown support into a standalone program, but either way it will be free for all backers. There will also be some nice interoperability, such as a “Convert to Showdown” option so you can convert a Savage Worlds character you made into a Savage Worlds Showdown character.

Oh, and I found a group of gamers to play Deadlands with. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a chance to do that, so that’s a huge help as it gives me a face to face gaming table that can test out Wild Card Creator.