Wow, what a week! I had anticipated a launch two weeks ago, but decided to hold off until I'd shipped a couple of last-minute features, namely expanding the program's vocabulary with nearly 200 new place types, and updating it to fail forward if it encounters words that it doesn't recognize. On Thursday, I finally bit the bullet and made my first public announcement on Hacker News.
This was a bit of a make-or-break moment for me, because while I knew what I had built was useful to me, I had no idea if other people would "get it". Certainly the concept proved difficult to explain to friends in a way that made sense. If I failed to gain traction on HN, I planned to make a few attempts elsewhere, then effectively shelve the project and move on to other things.
Instead, a lot of people seemed to be as excited by it as I was. I spent all day and evening on Thursday responding to messages via Discord, HN, and email, as well and shipping a quick bug fix in response to user feedback. On Friday, I woke up to find my first subscriber on Buy Me a Coffee (thanks, Rafael!). Energized, I dove into development of the first of the two feature requests that've come up by far the most: making the input case-insensitive. This is not a thing that Rust makes particularly easy, certainly not to do efficiently, but I came up with a clever solution and had that deployed at the end of the day.
Issues closed last week
More permissive parser accepts commands with unknown words
Add a ncurses-style box view for characters and locations
Added the
morealias for generating additional suggestionsUpdated the tutorial for the 0.2 milestone release
Fixed the
morealias not being available on browsers lacking local storage supportSupport thing types that the generator can't name independently
Added approximately 180 new place types
Added (and then emboldened) the Buy Me a Coffee link
Fixed styling on the input box in dark mode
Made autocomplete case-insensitive
This week
I had a lot of trouble maintaining the discipline of not working on the project over the weekend, but this is currently my full-time job, and I keep an according work schedule.
My plan for this week is to deliver the other big request: command history. That will probably be simple enough, but it dovetails nicely into a few other adjacent features and quality-of-life changes that I'll also hammer away on this week. Specifically, I want to persist some amount of scrollback upon repeat visits, as well as saving undo history between visits. (Also implied by the preserved scrollback is a clear command, in case you don't want that history any more.) I'm not 100% sure how many of those features I'll deliver this week, but we'll see how it goes.
The other thing I intend to do is work out my roadmap for the following two weeks. I will be taking most of the month of December off, so I want to figure out which features I need to deliver before I can step back for a little while. Off the top of my head, there are two big ones:
Introduce relationships between things.
Allow people to import and export their data.
Lacking any sort of cloud sync feature, I don't want to leave people without a way to keep their data safe for long. For most of the development period, the journal was a bit of a toy feature, but now that it's feasible to have an entire campaign sketched out in there, the stakes are a lot higher. I've had quite a few requests for storing descriptions and notes in the journal, but I don't want to touch that until export and cloud sync are viable options to keep your data safe. (Look for that in the new year.)