React Flow story creator
I knew the story creator would be tough, but thorough research brought me to ReactFlow. Using a basic react flow design I was able to create a clear tree like model of a users branching storyline for easy editing. Story data would be stored as JSONB in my database, so on each save the data could be rewritten, ensuring story structures remained consistent.
Social media dashboard
A firsthand experience into user testing. Originally meant to simply display stories, users preferred to be able to create stories directly through the dashboard, they also wanted comments, then likes. I took a barebones page and turned it into a lite social media with suggestions from the people using my site.
The story Reader
The story reader features a simple textbox for story beats, and up to four buttons to advance the story in response to the text. This was made simple by unpacking JSON into multiple typescript types. Allowing for a concrete structure to navigate a story: Each story gets children choices, those choices link to a new page.
Overall lessons
This was as much a learning experience as it was a serious project. Not only did I learn much about the stack I used, but I learned two major lessons. 1. Research heavily for development tools, my original plan for the site was minimal, but discoveries like ReactFlow revolutionized my plans, turning creation and story storage nearly trivial. 2. User test! Not only was it fun, but my project completely changed for the better, it was not supposed to be a social media, but I'm glad it ended up incorporating some of those aspects due to suggestions from testers.