Savage Worlds Character Generator Program on Kickstarter

Journeyman Games, has just announced a Kickstarter for a new program, Wild Card Creator. The purpose of the program is to simplify the creating of characters for various settings by coming up with a way to read in a PDF that the user owns and converting the information into the necessary program elements, like finding all the new Edges, Skills and, possibly, the Equipment. Then the user can select which materials are to be used for character generation.

Some discussion about the program has been happening on the Pinnacle Entertainment Group's forums. The program isn't going to be a real natural language processor, but instead will trigger off key phrases found in the PDF. I'm not sure how well the program could be developed to follow the reading flow of a PDF versus how it is actually, structurally stored in the file. Judging by the creator's response about how it will handle processing PDFs, the program will need to be updated as publishers put out new material anyways.

But even if the PDF functionality doesn't come to fruition, just being able to manually enter the information would be helpful for centralizing information from the various sources. One of the other proposed features would be a way to export the rules so that they could be emailed to other users so that the GM and his players are all on the same page when it comes to character creation and what is/isn't allowed in the campaign.

This Kickstarter has reached its goal and now they've posted up some Stretch Goals for the project:

$4,500 — All copies include over 150 pieces of art from Storn Cook, artist for the Fantasy Companion, Supers Companion, and Necessary Evil, which you can use as character portraits.

$6,000 — You'll also be able to create armies for Savage Worlds Showdown, Pinnacle's miniature game based on Savage Worlds. (I'll try my best to get this feature in by November, but if it doesn't make it, it'll be in a free update).

$8,000 — Immediately after Wild Card Creator is released, work begins on an iPad and Android tablet version of Wild Card Creator and all backers will be able to get it for half off when it's ready.