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WIREFRAMING
So the guiding goal of the project was following KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid). I broke out what was required to make the program work and just wanted to make sure it had those very basic features. It was at this point I also identified some potential use cases that would benefit the competitive scene as well so my list of requirements increased a little bit to include:
- Set game’s local directory
- Host your match in the ATLAS program
- Edit / Remove your match
- Be able to lock a match so only people you whitelist can join as well as other permissions such as, allowing only spectators and the maximum number of users you’re allowing for the match.
02. Pages
BETA RELEASE
After a few weeks of programming I had a pretty barebones program that hit all the requirements I set for myself. I was excited to get it in player’s hands and hear what the feedback on the program was and how it was working. This became a good exercise in humility that even though some design decisions make sense to you and they’re established patterns they might not make sense to all users. My expectation was to hear feedback on wanting more features, wanting existing ones to function differently and quickly the most frequent response was.
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PUBLIC RELEASE
So after that lesson of Windows users rightfully want controls that are consistent across all their apps, I made that shift as well as some other functionality changes to make creating your whitelist easier. Particularly adding a tagging system to have type ahead search when adding users, as well as teams of people so you can just search by their team name and add them all at once.
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FUTURE PLANS
The state it’s in now is currently doing it’s job. There’s always some code optimizations I’d like to add and roll those updates out. But thinking longer term, I’d like to see ATLAS as a sort of a hub for a handful of tools made that help solve an issue that the community has, whether that’s around game analytics, game data visualization, or content creation. While I continue to work on that and push it to that state it’s always good to see players using it to group up and meet people they might not have otherwise had a chance to play with, which was the goal all along.
If you’re interested, ATLAS can be downloaded at:
https://www.echovrconnect.com/