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LK Weekly: Boards Progress and PAX U
🕑 Added 2021-11-12 18:18:28 +0000 UTCHey everyone! It's Weekly time!
Boards
Boards are coming along swimmingly. Braden has patched up most of the syncing code, and Justin is examining the UI. The demo you saw last week used the native UI in the whiteboard library. While it's nice, LK must have a nice cohesive feel, so we'll be giving it an interface that matches the LK vibe. Plus, we want LK-specific power features, like dropping wiki cards into your whiteboards for maximum "corkboard murder mystery" shenanigans.
Mucking around with boards has once again surfaced big organizational questions in the LK UI. While it's nice to have these "sandboxed" tools ("Wiki," "Atlas," "Boards"), we wonder if it would be more intuitive if we unified everything under the same sidebar... Here's a quick-and-dirty mock-up Braden made of what that might look like. This would be a significant paradigm shift for the app, with lots of unanswered questions—worth exploring, in our opinion.
What do you think about this idea mock-up? Notice how the primary sidebar is gone, and everything is just a page. (The following image is a GIF; I think these don't work in email, so you'll need to visit this Patreon post directly to view it.)
As the Boards feature nears complete functionality next week, we'll have the Hydra Slayers, our volunteer internal testing team, start picking at it. Shoot Braden a message on Discord if you'd like to take part in that.
PAX Unplugged
The entire LK team will be at PAX Unplugged! We've been dying to go to a con, but Circumstances have prevented that. We're excited to get the opportunity! While we won't have a booth, we look forward to a weekend of gaming and chatting RPGs with other hobbyists and creators. Fun fact: This is Braden and Justin's first con!
Shoot us a message on Discord if you'll be there--we can meet up and say hello! We wanted to have some custom LK softcover journals printed for swag handouts, but unfortunately, it was a little too last minute. We still want to do journals, but we'll save that for another time.
Onboarding
While Braden and Justin are plugging away at Boards, Adam continues the marketing arm of the revised Onboarding effort. Adam is building a series of onboarding emails in our new email messaging platform. These emails will update the ANCIENT intro email that's sent now and offer some tips on how to get started. Those will start going out to new patrons next week.
Chartopia
If you're not familiar with Chartopia, it's a random table discovery + creation tool that makes a great companion at the gaming table. We love anything and everything that makes GMs lives easier! Since we have a common goal, we've decided to support Chartopia development and take out a display ad on their homepage. You all should check them out! They've got a custom API and DSL so that you can go crazy with your random tables.
We aren't focusing on advertising specifically right now; this opportunity with Chartopia was just one we couldn't pass up. After the PAX conference, we'll turn more attention to advertising.
That's all for now! Please leave questions and comments below, or hit us up on Discord in the #beta-discussion or #feedback channels.
Later!
TEAM LK
Comments
Asherett
I really like the mockup. The Atlas, sad to say, remains almost unused by me. But then again I'm more of a "text navigation" type of person ;) I think it's really important to try to integrate the text and the map for each page/article somehow. I'm thinking something like a big obvious button that changes between map view and text view for each article, and maybe small previews always visible. Or simply the map always being at the top of each article (that has a map), with a quick link to jump down the text part (if it has text). The least attractive option would be text/map tabs. Regardless, you should have a unified tree view in the sidebar, and I love that about the mockup. The pull in to create pin function is also stellar!
I really like the mockup. I'd love to be able to create "just maps" or at least make them easier to surface to people who aren't as familiar with the Atlas vs Wiki distinction. Right now it feels easy to make "just a wiki entry" by not adding an associated map but the reverse isn't true. Boards would likely suffer from the same issue without some kind of change.
