A lot has been happening here at Dized. Well, “here” seems a bit misleading as I’m currently sitting alone at the office writing this because everyone’s working remotely. But nevertheless, things have been progressing with Dized every day. And yes, that includes weekends too.
For the better part of last year we were pretty much focused on the development of the platform and were now ready to start moving our focus to growth. We’ve been able to make the content easier to create and access than before, so let’s talk more about that.
New Features
In the beginning of this year Dized has gotten a couple of requested features. The app can now be used in portrait mode and it has a search.
Naturally, the portrait mode was always on the roadmap, the challenge was rather the implementation of it. It seems like it should be a simple thing but turned out to be more work than anticipated. This caused us to push the feature till later, as it was more important to focus on other things, like building the tools that allow the creation of more content.
Once we got the tools to a stage when the Dized library slowly started to grow we decided to take the time to implement the portrait mode.
The story for the search is the same, as the size of the library was small enough that it was somewhat easy to browse through it all without the search being available. Now that we’re looking to get more content soon the demand for the search grew, so we took the time to implement the search into the app too.
New Platforms
Dized Tutorials are now available on the web! This means people can access them with their computers too, though smart devices still require the Dized app. We weren’t actually planning on doing the web presence quite yet but at this point of our development the feature happened to be a low hanging fruit.
The Dized Content Creation Tools are used online with a browser, and they are so called WYSIWYG tools: What You See Is What You Get. So while we were creating the tools, we naturally needed them to have an ability to show the content as it will be seen by users in Dized. And once this had been developed far enough it was quite easy to bring the Tutorials publicly available to the web too.
We’ll be focusing next on Dized Rules so we can bring the best possible digital rules experience to the web as well. After that we’ll be looking at tools for localizing and translating the contents.
New Content
This year there has already been 3 more Tutorials to Dized: chess, Fluxx and Shobu. The tutorials have so far been for lighter games as the CCTs (Content Creation Tools) have been developed further. With advancements in the tool more complex games are starting to appear soon, with first ones being for Tokyo Sidekick, Cerebria and Scythe.
We are still in the very early stages of growth, but it’s already looking promising with the increasing speed of new tutorials. This is an indication that we’ve been able to make the tools efficient enough for it to be affordable for publishers.
One major challenge for getting the growth really going has been the pandemic. The expos have been cancelled and this has prevented us from meeting with hundreds of publishers. We are doing the work online but it’s definitely not as efficient as being able to show in person what we have and how it works.
And getting the publishers interested is just the first step. Someone also needs to create the content as publishers are typically too busy to do it themselves. This is why we’ve also been increasingly focusing on training more content creators. For this we have put together an online guide with a practice project that will get people started, and we also have a community on Discord where creators can ask questions and share ideas.
Making The Dreams Come True
We still have a long road ahead to make our dreams come true about improving the tabletop gaming experience, and about making the hobby more accessible and inclusive for everyone. Having gotten the platform to its current state the dream feels more achievable than ever before!
You can find the Dized web tutorials here: https://dized.com/tutorials
