Hello Miners! Andrew here from the dev team, bringing you a view of our plan for the future of Karl.gg.
We hope you are enjoying the site thus far, but you are only looking at our "Minimium Viable Product" for the project. A group of passionate developers got together out of love for Deep Rock Galactic, and brought the community a tool we all desperately wanted to use anyways. We rallied around a plan of MVP features in order to get something out in the community as fast as possible, and now it is time to refine further.
We have a group of talented folks here, and we are all very motivated to bring you a host of new features that will make Karl.gg an even more versatile site.
High-level, our first priority is a number of "housekeeping" items. These are fixes or refinements that will be largely not noticeable for our users, but the features offer a significant value to the overall health of the application.
After these enhancements, we move into the meat of our Phase 2 plan.
Phase 2: Main Features
- Preview Page Enhancements
- We want to improve a few existing features, such as adding modification details when hovering them on the preview page
- Addition of a "Guide" field: we are working on a feature which will allow you to write more fully-featured guides along with your build. This will allow you to explain the awesome parts of your build, and/or explain how to manage the quirks of your particular setup
- Patch Management
- In essence, we want to be able to "roll with the punches" -- i.e. when DRG is patched, we should be able to support loadout building for that patch ASAP
- More detail to come on this feature, and there will likely be a blog post explaining our strategy here
- Advanced Statistics View
- Many of you may be aware of the work MeatShield has done in creating a community tool for advanced data insights for DRG
- We will be incorporating this data into Karl.gg, and it will allow you to see insights for weapons based on your current configuration
- A blog post will also be forthcoming for this feature, and you can expect us to demonstrate the features in that post
Phase 2: Secondary Features
- Curated Loadouts: A number of our community members have insight into excellent builds, and would have recommendations for "Haz 5 Best Builds" as an example
- Our desire is to empower our community to help us curate these builds, and highlight them on a special page or section of our homepage as "Greybeard Loadouts". These are loadouts that have been vetted and approved as high-quality, and can be a great piece of content for our members. This will definitely leverage the "Guide" field, which is the main reason it is a secondary priority.
- Public API: The data from our loadouts is very interesting, as is the data used to produce the loadouts. In addition, the advanced statistics data will also be very interesting to look at. To this end, we have a desire to leverage the effort to produce all this data and distribute it to our community.
- Developers, rejoice -- Karl.gg data will be available in a Public API(REST and GraphQL) for your consumption.
- We have no intentions to charge for this API, but if usage becomes an issue we will keep the community informed of any changes in the API pricing model.
- Comments for Loadouts: We will be adding the ability for users to leave comments on loadouts.
- Loadout Builder Enhancements:
- We are looking at features such as "share without saving", similar to the legacy Karl builder from Surmiran.
- "User Self Copy Loadout" would allow you to copy your builds a bit easier, thanks to the community for that suggestion!
- Pickaxe & Throwables included in loadout builder -- these are items we just didn't have in time for MVP but will be added!
- Perks: we wanna implement them too! This is one of our later priority items, so it may take some time for this feature specifically.
Of course there's a number of granular activities around these main items I have mentioned, but those are the core details. We definitely appreciate all the feedback thus far, and we want to continue to hear feedback from the community. We encourage you to join our Discord server to share feedback and have discussions with us, and follow our Twitter account so you don't miss any updates.
We hope this gives you a good picture of where Karl.gg is headed, and we look forward to Phase 2 and beyond!
Rock and Stone!