Dev Diary #316 Notice Board Systems
Ahoy Ylanders!
This week, our programmer Radek will share a few insights about our internal system called Notice Board. This nice addition to our game is a digital bulletin board, crafted to enhance your gaming experience by bringing you relevant information happening around the Ylands game.
Key Features
Dynamic Content Updates: Keeping players informed and engaged is crucial, so we've developed a dynamic hub filled with content to ensure you never miss out on the essential happenings in the Ylands universe. Stay updated on upcoming patches, new shop content, latest features, and game changes.
Visual Experience: To get your attention, we have designed an aesthetic board with a charming board theme. Our UI Designer carefully crafted the variants of paper notes that are easily integrated into the dynamic system we developed.
Technical Aspects
Originally the tool was required by the marketing team and it was intended to be just a place with brief notes served to the players updated approximately once a month. Because of this simplified design and underestimation of the potential size of that system, we encountered several complications during the development process.
We chose a more simplistic approach inspired by the classic blog systems but we had to work with static data uploaded on the server. We chose the JSON file format for storage.
The JSON file you upload to the server needs to be manually edited, which can be easy for a tech-savvy person, but can be a nightmare for the average PC user. That's why it's important to choose the right tools while simplifying the editing process itself, which was also underestimated at first.
If you're building a tool that requires the work of others while giving you the ability to update content fairly frequently, reach for a database solution rather than static data and expose some simple frontend app with convenient editing tools. Unfortunately, we were limited by time and did not expect that the system would become such an integral tool.
Fortunately, there are ways to automate these things, so we created a spreadsheet where the marketing team can update their data while keeping track of what has been published. They then generate a JSON file from that table and just send it to the backend server.
While this process still requires the involvement of at least 3 people, editing such a spreadsheet and then uploading the final changes to the server takes much less time.
In conclusion, we'd just like to point out that it's always a good idea to consider the importance and potential workload of such a system and invest time in developing tools and then working with them more efficiently accordingly. Since its release, the Notice Board has become one of the most visited places in Ylands.
We are constantly working on improving the Notice Board and have some exciting additions planned for the next update.
Is there something you'd like to see on the Notice Board? Let us know!
Stay classy, ylanders!
This week, our programmer Radek will share a few insights about our internal system called Notice Board. This nice addition to our game is a digital bulletin board, crafted to enhance your gaming experience by bringing you relevant information happening around the Ylands game.
Key Features
Dynamic Content Updates: Keeping players informed and engaged is crucial, so we've developed a dynamic hub filled with content to ensure you never miss out on the essential happenings in the Ylands universe. Stay updated on upcoming patches, new shop content, latest features, and game changes.
Visual Experience: To get your attention, we have designed an aesthetic board with a charming board theme. Our UI Designer carefully crafted the variants of paper notes that are easily integrated into the dynamic system we developed.
Technical Aspects
Originally the tool was required by the marketing team and it was intended to be just a place with brief notes served to the players updated approximately once a month. Because of this simplified design and underestimation of the potential size of that system, we encountered several complications during the development process.
We chose a more simplistic approach inspired by the classic blog systems but we had to work with static data uploaded on the server. We chose the JSON file format for storage.
The JSON file you upload to the server needs to be manually edited, which can be easy for a tech-savvy person, but can be a nightmare for the average PC user. That's why it's important to choose the right tools while simplifying the editing process itself, which was also underestimated at first.
If you're building a tool that requires the work of others while giving you the ability to update content fairly frequently, reach for a database solution rather than static data and expose some simple frontend app with convenient editing tools. Unfortunately, we were limited by time and did not expect that the system would become such an integral tool.
Fortunately, there are ways to automate these things, so we created a spreadsheet where the marketing team can update their data while keeping track of what has been published. They then generate a JSON file from that table and just send it to the backend server.
While this process still requires the involvement of at least 3 people, editing such a spreadsheet and then uploading the final changes to the server takes much less time.
In conclusion, we'd just like to point out that it's always a good idea to consider the importance and potential workload of such a system and invest time in developing tools and then working with them more efficiently accordingly. Since its release, the Notice Board has become one of the most visited places in Ylands.
We are constantly working on improving the Notice Board and have some exciting additions planned for the next update.
Is there something you'd like to see on the Notice Board? Let us know!
Stay classy, ylanders!
