August 22, 2020

Dev Blog - Windows!

We're as busy as ever with the alpha test and new development, but since we've stopped posting our monthly Meetup notes things have been quiet here on the blog! After some discussion among the MyWorld staff, we've decided to start posting occasional development blog updates so that those of you who aren't on our Discord yet can keep up with our progress.

The last few months have been a whirlwind as we've opened MyWorld for alpha testing, open sourced Chipmunk, our in-house scripting language, and continued new development. Today we'd like to share our newest development with you - windowing support in the UI!

Previously, the UI design was what we called "flow based" - as users clicked around to interact with the world and perform tasks (such as creating new objects in the world), UI elements relevant to their activity would appear and disappear. There were two problems with this: it wasn't customizable, and it required us to spend a lot of time and energy designing UI flows that would fit most users and wouldn't irritate the rest! As feedback from the alpha testers showed a lot of interest in having a window-based UI and as the limitations of the flow-based UI became apparent, we decided that we would keep the best features of the flow-based UI and add support for windows. This gives us the best of all worlds: users can customize both their view and their workflow, the UI still retains its fluid, responsive feel, and it frees up a lot of our time and energy to focus on other features.

Here's what it looks like now:

If you'd like to hear about new developments as soon as they're announced, come join us on Discord. It's our primary means of contact with our community, and we have many fun conversations there too - so if you haven't joined yet, please do! Facebook and Twitter are also a great way to receive our updates, and following us on social media helps us get the word out too.