BobaBoard's First Week (6/23/20)
Forgive (not really) the different formatting of this developement logs' edition, but... it's time for the official summary of the first week of BobaBoard!
The moral of this particular story is I shouldn't have access to greenscreen gifs.
As those paying attention might remember, last time I was scrambling to launch a pre-alpha release on 6/9 for the memes to get early feedback. Today, I proclaim the ambitious goal accomplished: on 6/9, I bestowed access to the first set of boards upon a chosen group of ~15 individuals .
Nice, indeed.
"Well, the pre-alpha is launched," says the end user, ripe with the innocence of youthful dreams, "this means we're almost there, right?"
"Oh poop! Stupa! Stupa! Bi do," says the developer, abandoning the comfort of Onceler-themed jokes for new, more yellow horizons.
Boba Facts! Minions have their own consistent language, inspired by a variety of sounds and words from across the world. (Source:
minionsallday.com
)
Despite the success of the 6/9 super-special-awesome-pre-alpha launch (🎉🎉🎉✨✨✨), there's still tons of work left before BobaBoard can be declared anywhere near "good enough". Even basic functionality is still missing: there's no way to neither edit nor delete posts, no tagging interface, no "wrong password/username" errors on login, and signups are a manual process of inserting users in the database.
Still, the website is there. It's functional*(-ish)*. But most importantly, it's fun. So, without further ado get ready for...
Dear Reader,
heed my advice: this section gets long. If you'd rather skip the retelling of our present fun and beam yourself directly into the future, click here to skip ahead to the next steps section.
Still here? Great! Let's set the tone: for all the fun you're going to hear about today, no amount of words can represent BobaBoard's current status better than this animation a user has generously donated.
The second board description is supposed to read “Bugs, feature requests, impressions, tests, shitposts, and everything else related to BobaBoard,” but this works too.
Not to worry, though! The early testers are taking their jobs of bug-squashing to heart, poking at prodding at every hole, finding bugs I hadn't even thought of testing and some I didn't think would be uncovered so soon.
me: it's ok, we're among friends, no one will try something too out there.
the friends:
And speaking of missing features, what's up with A Cold and Broken Waluigi ? See, the aggressive deadline sank my original plan of commissioning customized avatars for the anonymous identities. Rather than despair, however, I called upon the aid of my favorite vessels of hope and guidance, always there for me during my adventures. I'm talking, of course, about memes.
It turned out to be a great choice.
It took us all a while to get over Ted Cruz's constantshark porn habit.
On that topic, I'm happy to report our contestant for the first, official BobaBoard meme. Its official designation is— I swear, I didn't do this on purpose—"Getting Onceler'd".
Remember how, before implementing image upload, I had replaced posted images with my Kim Kardashian Onceler photoshop ? Turns out I didn't completely remove that particular hack. When the conditions are just right some images still end up "Getting Onceler'd". The apparently random nature of this phenomenon has caused users to attempt to claim the honor for themselves.
See that copy-pasted image messing up the formatting of the comment? That's a bug too. Even just writing this reminds me of how much there is to fix.
Soon, an official guide was born.
"Upupupupu", as they say.
Rest assured: no matter how many new memes we create, we will never forget where we came from. And having unwittingly skimmed on some basic checks—like, random example, character limits—has left the website wide open for some of the common pranks of the modern internet era.
This file is named "popping the berry". "Bee cherry"... "Barry"... Fine, I'll see myself out.
I know you're wondering, "did they do anything but meme?". Rest easy! Indeed our small group of Boba friends (the Boobies, as I and only I are calling us) shared many profound, mind-bending meta discussions.
We also stress-tested the limits of the platform with the first official "BobaLivestream" during the PlayStation 5 reveal event . This crowned BobaBoard as, according to one anon, a "good live-shitposting platform". But without resting on these laurels (there's still a lot of work to turn that good into great), I'd like to let some selected screenshots tell this particular tale.
Chris' bio-engineered protein powder will trigger Resident Evil 16's outbreak.
Stay tuned for BobaBoard's soon to be announced monsterfucking-based ETF.
Now, while there is still so much I could add, the tale of the first week of BobaBoard must come to an end. Before I leave you to the next steps, however, I'd like to highlight one final piece of feedback that perfectly encapsulates the spirit of the week.
Q: What's your experience of BobaBoard?
No matter how much work is still left to do, and no matter how mad I am at iOS Safari for tripling the amount of work I have, this week has shown us that the journey is indeed better when done together. And so, with BobaBoard's new slogan guiding us towards the future, it's time to move forward to what's next.
As you might remember, I had borrowed my kitchen wall to create a roadmap for the features I wanted in the alpha. Thanks to super advanced stop-motion technology, I'd like to provide you with a visual update of the progress:
While it might seem like a large percentage of the features are still missing (and I'm the first one cautioning against overoptimistic timelines), the initial roadmap didn't include a lot of time consuming set-up steps necessary to get the project moving. From here onwards, I expect progress to be both faster and slower.
Faster because the overhead for new architectural pieces is much lighter now that I've decided on libraries and put (some) infrastructure and conventions in place.
Slower because nothing like real, living users with scoffs "actual needs" brings you to re-evaluate priorities and dedicate time to bug fixing rather than progress.
Rather than fixing iOS bugs, I'm presently considering just buying every user an Android phone.
While I have yet to decide a target date for the alpha release (I work better with deadlines, but meme-y dates are too far ahead to be useful right now), I'm currently exploring two directions for onboarding new testers:
- I'd like to onboard 1-2 additional small groups of friends (~10-15 people) to try BobaBoard as a standalone space of their own, with their own set of boards. I believe independent sets of eyes would help iron out what is working, what is missing, and how well the current setup can function as a private space for smaller groups of friends. With the support of these groups, I'd also like to start defining how the commonal space of boards, tags and groups(?) every user has access to will look like.
- I've been discussing with kinkmeme owners the minimal feature set that would help support their use case. Of course BobaBoard wouldn't be able to offer a space for large, public kinkmemes while in closed pre-alpha. Still, smaller kinkmemes ran within private discord servers might be good candidates for restricted access in exchange for feedback.
With that said, you'll definitely hear more about onboarding in the next update.
I hope this edition of the newsletter/dev-logs helped you appreciate what's already built, but also understand the limitations of the platform and the spirit of adventure that participation currently requires. Things can break at any time, and so, so, SO much is mising. If you believe you and your group are a good candidate for super early testers, let's talk! If the lack of features and polish turns you off, rest assured: there's no rush! You can always follow BobaBoard's adventures here, and give your thoughts and feedback on the appropriate form!
Twitter survives to this day without an edit button. Can you?