&Yes - Devlog 2 - Product Board & Ideas
Trello
I enjoy using a board when I work. The ability to garbage collect all the tasks/ideas/bugs I am mentally keeping track of, can be a great relief and free mental capacity for more important things. Prioritization also become much easier when you can get a visual overview.
The GitHub Projects Boards is decent. Being able to link "issues" to PR's is a neat way to track history. I sometimes miss certain features from Jira, such as having more clear visuals on blockers and dependencies. But both probably overkill for a one-man army like me.
I have seen a few indie game devs use Trello in their Youtube videos. The visual seems clean and easy to get an overview. Based on not much more than that I have decided to give it a go as my Product Board for this project and a few others. Let's see if I come to regret this impulsive decision later.
If you have experience with using Trello, good or bad, please do share ?? (While there is still a chance for me to go back!!)
Above you can see a very rough brain dump of some of the things I would like to do. I have tried to sketch them out a bit more below ??
Feature Ideas
Feedback Tracker
When doing improv you usually get feedback after every show from your teacher/coach when you are at my level and still have loads to learn. One thing is getting the feedback, another is remembering it and working on internalizing it.
This would almost be as simple as having a notebook, but I would like to have my feedback notes stored digitally and easy to find. On top of that, I think there should be an ability to highlight key elements from the feedback. In each show, there is most likely a few key things that could be better, should be avoided, or were awesome.
Highlighting these key feedbacks could perhaps help show a pattern if there is consistent feedback e.g. "listening" as an area where I could be better. Then my hope of having that highlighted easily would trigger my brain to have a deeper focus on this going forward.
Suggestion Generator
Improv comedy is based on the idea that every show is unique because there is a random seed element being the audience suggestion that is used as the basis for the show. When practicing, however you are trying to give yourself suggestions at times, which can be stale or repetitive. (Trust me, we humans are so predictable in our thinking and mainstream culture references).
The tool itself would be pretty simple, at the tap of a button give me a random suggestion for a location, song lyric, celebrity, relationship, emotion, etc. All I would need is to scrape some data from somewhere to generate the lists that the tool would pick from.
The data for this feature could potentially also be used to help inspire improvisers with different kinds of locations or emotions they bring to the stage. The amount of scenes that happen in a restaurant is very high. I don't want this to be used during a show. But it could perhaps be a pre-show training tool to get bombarded with a series of emotions to give some different inspiration to the improviser using it. A sort of "Inspiration Mode".
Format Library
In improv, you have a lot of different formats you can use to structure your show. These are broken down into Short Games and Long Form formats. There is a long long list of formats and games. Each group/theater/country might have its own style, names, or variations on the same core ideas.
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Just as with having a product board, it would be nice to have a space to dump all the games and formats I have learned/seen. So that I can more easily find them again and remember them. This would also be a cool way to share information across communities.
The upgraded version of this feature would also have small recordings where the format is demonstrated so that you can more easily understand the concept. Improv formats are often easier to understand when seen rather than explained in my experience. This would however be quite a lot of effort, on the other hand in might also be a feature that could justify a premium version of the app.
Short Form Planner
The "Format Library" is a feature that I have added because I need it for this feature. When my group does shows, we often do a short form set. We try and structure the games so that we have a high-energy opener and a strong closer. With a mix of line games, guessing games, etc. in the middle. If I had a list of all the games we do, it would be easy to give them categories.
Then you could select a template, dependent on how much time you have for your set, amount of performers, etc. For each placeholder in the template, you would get short-form games that fit the template suggested. How strict this should be I am not sure, a certain amount of creative flexibility is usually required when making a set. But being able to have a way to remember games and structure the set list would be a great help.
On top of this, you would usually have a host and dedicated performers for each game. So having a way to manage that would be a way to expand the feature.
Goals
Gamification!
I am a competitive person, no doubt about it. So this feature might be more for myself, than aligned with the core concept of what improv comedy is really about.
However, I think it would be cool to have a way to get randomized goals or challenges to motivate yourself to try something new. With challenges of mixed difficulty (beginner, intermediate and advanced), you could nudge the users to learn new techniques.
Examples could be:
Events
I don't like ads and I would like to be able to keep the app mostly free of charge. One way I have considered the app could create a bit of revenue would be to allow venues to promote shows/courses/events that are relevant to improvisers in their area.
Not a key feature, and not one that I will prioritize very highly. But it's an idea...
What do you think?
Those are the features I have been playing around with in my head. A core benefit from a software viewpoint is that most of the features do not require any servers/backend and could run locally. Which would reduce operational costs of the app.
If you have any comments/suggestions to the ideas listed above or have other ideas that could be cool to implement in &Yes then please drop them in a comment below. I would love to get some feedback ??
Stay fresh and remember to enjoy life!
insurance nerd
2 年I love it! I do have one idea though: it would be great with a random game generator. You will already have made the library for All the different games and I would like if you could also access them randomly. Like for instance, i would like to try a short form game that i dont do often (or maybe have never done) then i could use a random game generator to just choose any of the short form games in the games library. And extra cool thing would be if I could also put in more search criteria, like if i Wanted a high energy game or an audience partition game and so on. I think a lot of us tend to do the same 20 games again and again, and a game generator could push us a bit. If what i wrote isnt clear, you can ask me irl ??