Ship
READY TO SHIP!!!
The occasion for this amazing app has already long passed and I’m happy to share that the gift was a total success! ;D
Now in between vacation and other side-quests, I’ve managed to tidy everything up enough to be able to share all this with the wider audience.
The app itself has undergone minor tweaks - a title on the home page and a custom app icon.
Took me quite a bit to figure out how the .apk packages work, though. I’m hoping that I managed to successfully create a signed copy of my creation and it is accessable for everybody in the repo Releases section.
Lastly, the easiest, yet the most daunting part was writing the actual README. It might not be the most pleasant looking description in the world, but it’s mine and that’s what matters :)
Now fingers crossed I did everything correctly for shipping…
ALL CHALLENGE SECTIONS DONE
The long-dreaded film roll update turned out to be way easier than expected. I really wanted to maximise the Photo Booth experience, that’s why I made the photos show up on the roll after task completion. Now it actually looks like those photo strips in real life!
This morning I also built the third section - Color Catch. The concept is to photograph certain objects of certain colours and complete the collection. That is why the rainbow section screen is the perfect way to go! I didn’t really want to overwhelm the adventure more by adding less frequent categories for hunting (like animals or clothing (find a purple animal xd)), so I simplified it to 6 photos from 4 categories (2 for nature and random). The photo upload logic is similar to the Photo challenges.
To be fair, it was surprisingly satisfying rewriting the challenge types after it got messy. Instead of separate MapChallenge and PhotoChallenge elements, I put the shared logic into BaseChallenge and just extended that interface with section specific parameters.
The only thing is have trouble fixing is the color challenge modal size. For some reason, everywhere except the Expo Go app on my phone, the photos are square ant the window wraps them beautifully. But on my mobile, the aspect ratio is off and there are a lot of free space for no apparent reason. I tried everything, but maybe this is one of those things, that fixes itself up after a short break :)
FIRST SECTION FINISHED!!!
The “Goeguessr” section (where the challenges are to find the described place and complete a quest at it) is now complete. The only missing (though optional) part is the collection of stickers after completion of every task, however, for now I’m moving on to the other part of the adventure. Below there’s a screenshot of one of the final quest version.
A for the Photo Booth, I’m super proud of the film roll design for the photo challenges. Nothing too complicated, just playing around with color-matching and margins :p
Now I continue to work on creating the actual Booth challenges. The idea is to give an example drawing of a duo pose and the user has to replicate it and upload the photo to the app. Completed challenges display the taken picture on the film roll. So writing their logic is currently the first point on my To-do list.
For these past few days, I’ve been getting familiar with Expo Go and React Native, since I’ve never done mobile or much web development before. Now about the project itself, I’m building a fun little temporary app as a gift for my partner - basically a guide for a whole-day date. The idea is that there are 3 sections: memorable spot searching, photographing specific colours to form a puzzle and replicating silly couple photography poses. For every challenge, the user collects custom design stickers (which are made irl too!) and with enough progress unlocks the big prize - tickets to a favourite concert! Now I’m focusing on building the “Geoguessr” quest. The main screen base is done, map challenge page layout is mostly done, I even managed to successfully implement task completion. Some design touch ups are still due and I actually need to write the challenges. But it’s a great start!
