Week #700 & #701

Friday, July 19th, 02024 at 21:12 UTC

Week #700

On Monday, we had our Friday PETALS meet-up. We went over each of the screens. The goal is to clean-up some of the text and design, use the data to focus the story and general clean-up and bug fixes. The next few weeks are gong to be slow with PETALS, but it’s good to always have a backlog of small tasks when things are slow.

Miami Project is rumbling along. Bug fixes, feature requests and UI tweaks all coming in this week as they get more feedback from real customers.

We’ve been working on our Adventure Mazes again. After a lot of feedback, we’ve realized that we needed to increase our page count in the books. Since all the mazes are generated in code, it was easy create a 100 page adventure maze book. A few minutes here and a few minutes there, we’ve been solving each maze just to confirm it is possible and made some small editorial changes to make it more fun. We want to prep this for the holiday season(s) and start to work on digital versions for download and print at home.

Another game proposal and prototype we made is moving to the next stage of its life-cycle. The feedback was well received and now we’re shifting some resources around to re-build it in Unity to see how far we can get easily.

We’ve been trying (and failing) to pry back some time for another VR project. We’re still in good shape because most of the content is not available yet, but it will be in a few weeks and everyone’s going to want to see some progress!

Week #701

On Monday, we relocated the office to the other side of the country to Egilsstaðir for a few weeks. It will be a nice change of scenery and allow us to get a break from office construction. It is a long trip, but there are plenty of amazing scenery along the way.

This month was the start of the 3rd quarter, which means we sent out our Q3 quarternotes newsletter. You can always subscribe via email and RSS, or just read the archives online at optional.is/newsletter/

The Miami project continues to rumble along. Every day, we make progress. It is in those exciting days of building something new for a customer, getting feedback and iterating on a daily basis. We’re not stuck in arguing about what feature to build or how to eke out 1% more performance from onboarding or how to increase D30 retention.

We’re getting back on track with our VR projects. Next week, there is a videography team going on location to record some video and photos for us to use on the VR headsets and tablet devices. We’ve been prepping most of app work with demo photos and videos, but it will be great to start to swap it out with real content.

Internally, we’ve been working on revamping some of our print-on-demand projects for Q4. We’ve tried to make it more digestible. If we can break it down into small enough tasks, there is hope we can get through all of them. Step 1: Take our three books and generate the additional content. 3/3 Done. Step 2: Review that content and make adjustments. 2/3 Done. Step 3: Merge those changes back into the source PDF. 2/3 Done. Step 4: Re-publish the books on Amazon. 2/3 Done. The final (optional) step is to update the logo. It was originally hand-drawn and is not balanced and was obviously done by someone right-handed. Step 1: Mathematically map out the design and redraw. Done. Step 2: Digitize to vectors. 10% Done? Step 3: Update all instances of it. This is going to be a long process as we’ll continue to find it in places for a while.

Bric-a-brac

On July 8th at 11:15 UTC, 99% of the World’s population is under the same sunlight at the same time. Fact Checked..