Whether you're meticulously designing a story or simply planting its seed to watch it grow, your locations can be as rich as characters. Each area of your world has a unique personality that interacts with your characters, informs your plot, and illustrates your themes.
We can help you discover the world your story deserves.
This ongoing personal project is an app for storytellers (novelists, screenwriters, etc.) to assist in world-building. I wanted to use this project as an opportunity to explore features new to me using vanilla React and CSS rather than utilizing libraries.
Paper & Garden is a full-stack web application that takes in input about a fictional world and saves the information to a user's account.
- Paper & Garden offers a user-friendly way to develop fictional worlds.
- It was built for creators to save and expand upon the worlds of their fiction.
- Users are able to fill out information based on the prompts and reference them during the writing process.
- Language: JavaScript
- Frontend: React, CSS, Next.js, axios
- Server: Serverless
- Database: MongoDB
- Testing: Cypress.io
- Designing a simple, aesthetically pleasing, easily accessible UI
- Creating custom hooks to create a fully-functional form without utilizing a pre-made library.
- Researching how writers develop worlds in order to understand user needs and develop user stories.
- Optimizing user’s ability to create multiple worlds, multiple regions within each world, and multiple cities within each region with a scalable database.
- Using as few pre-made frameworks and tools as possible, in order to create many features from scratch for the purpose of understanding better how they work - and because it was more fun to have that extra challenge (listen, I have an odd definition of fun)
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User can submit data and retrieve that data
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Front end is accessible and mobile responsive
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Back end is designed for future scalability
- When the user logs in, the information is validated via axios get request.
- When the user creates a new world, an axios post request sends the data to the Mongo database without a server.
- When the user fills out a form, the information is saved in state via a custom React hook.
- When the user submits a form answer by pressing the "next" button, the information about the world they create is automatically saved to the database.
- Though the original project was to accomplish the MVP of the concept, I will be using a Feature Branch Workflow as it evolves.
- I implement Agile Practices to organize and execute this project.
- Full form functionality with increased usability
- "My Worlds" view incorporates accordion drawer design
- "Sign in with Google" authentication
- Stress-Testing and prepping for increased traffic as features evolve
- Sharpening the usability of the interface
- Users are able to edit their worlds after submission
- Input pulls in information from a natural resources API and auto-fills flora, fauna, weather information, etc.
- Users are able to share their worlds, to editors, background artists, illustrators, DMs, etc.
- Sister apps for character development and plot development that integrate with the world storytellers have created
- And much more!