Creative Collab
For the next release of our Open Source class we’re expected to not only contribute to existing projects but also create, maintain and grow our own project. As a class we brainstormed a lot of great ideas such as Supernova and pySearch. The project that I will be heavily involved in is Creative Collab.
As hobby some friends and I would take turns writing segments to build a collaborative story. We do this in different ways each time. Sometimes, by sharing a google doc, or if its only two people involved, then simply texting back and forth. Sometimes we go back and forth in real time and sometime we would take days to get a response back. Sometime we limited ourselves to one word at a time and sometimes it was at least 100 words each turn.
The problem was there is no existing platform I know of which helps us write like this. We had to enforce our own rules and set our own time limits and find a place to save our work each time. The goal of Creative Collab is to create an app that does this for us.
Now the problem of creating a project like this is we have to set our own steps. I keep getting distracted by what I want the end goal to be. I created the repo which only had a README and I got stuck wondering how to turn that blank slate into this great collaborative writing app. It was hard to figure out what the first steps were that needed to be taken to get there.
So I did some research and stumbled across boardgame.io which is an open source turn-based game framework and found our first step. I went through the tutorial and created a quick tic-tac-toe game to test it out and it was simple easy and seems adaptable for our purposes.
Sean took it a step further and gave us a connect four game using the boardgame.io. I also create a slack for this project since I, thankfully, have a community of interested developers that want to help and contribute. And now we have a better way to brainstorm and figure out our next steps. I’m excited to see what we can build together.
