I had a melatonin pill and I’m near dozing off. I felt tempted to leave the work log for tomorrow, but I opened write.now to let my fingers do the typing. I will write stream of consciousness and see what comes out.
Let’s see… I wanted to change the initial stages. I feel that, in apps as in real life, first impressions count a lot, so I wanted to get it right. I thought: perhaps it would be cool that the first thing you do is the logo, this way I can forego the intro screen and have the user basically build it. My clever idea hit many rough spots, it was not ideal as a first stage.
But then I thought: what if it is done sequentially? Not the entire logo, but piece by piece, and then at the end of the tutorial you have the full logo. Ahhh, and then you could set the favicon—but that would be a nice to have, and probably people wouldn’t notice it at all, even if you pointed it out. But what if you make it explicit? “Build the Favicon”… Hmmm… I hadn’t thought about that. It would be cool. After this, you could have a call to action to save it as a PWA on your home screen.
My thought is diverting: calls to install a PWA always happen at the wrong time, I don’t know if I want to install it until I know that it is useful or interesting to me. Notifications would be cool so that you know when there’s new stages installed, but that requires work beyond what I’m willing to invest at this time. I’ll leave this for later, this is not necessary for release.
The tutorial mechanics seem to be working: non-obtrusive, non-verbal, simply a touch pointer showing you what to do that disappears when you interact with the app. Even if you tap on it, the tap goes through and the animation disappears.
I think, what I ought to do tomorrow, is to think of the game in a narrative way. I’m completing the game from start to finish, and all steps along this experience have to be pleasant. Yes, I’ll try this out tomorrow. Time to go to bed.