Background

[Codename: “Lost Caves”] is currently an unannounced project that I want to work on this year. I’m currently exploring the idea of the project, the scope of the project and creating the documentation to build a prototype to test it with participants that’ll provide feedback and if the feedback is successful regarding the project worth pursuing, I will begin development of this project and provide updates on this project, otherwise I will cancel the project (which I hope I don’t have to do since currently, it feels like it’ll be a fun project to develop), while I don’t want to currently get into specifics of the project (i.e: what is the project, features etc), I just want to discuss the process thus around it building the conceptual idea. Keep in mind, everything in this post may be subject to change for anything in this project.

Ideas Exploration

The idea came as a side project to Spontaneous, which is currently on haitus as Spontaneous is a massive project to undertake as a solo developer, maybe I’ll look into getting a team together. The goal is to bring Spontaneous back into development in Q4 of 2025 (let’s see!), anyways, I wanted to work on a side-project in the meantime, something that’s small enough and fun that doesn’t involve (hopefully) too much complexity and time and that I can easily jump back in without a lot of componenets that require a lot of time to work on before it’s fully functional. I came to the idea that it should suit that purpose.

Starting the project, I was (probably still am) very stubborn about using s specific programming language, but it came to me that I would be limiting myself and the project’s potential. If I want to bring the project to another platform, I would have to redo the entire project all over again (which is what Spontaneous is facing, it’s only limited to iOS, although that is by design, to make my first native iOS application and publish it. I didn’t want to face the same issue, so I decided to take a step back from Swift on this project.

It’s always interesting to me that you can have a simple idea, it can easily expand to new ideas by seeing a design, listening to music, suddenly walking, and a feature comes to mind that you can implement, something new that’ll be great for the project etc. It makes an idea you feel passionate about, and drives a bigger spark to develop something better and possibly bigger.

I changed my project a few times so far, from programming language X to Y, what editor I will be using to increase what the project is from the original simple idea I had about and allowing the project to feel inspired rather than generic. For me, this is a fun process, (maybe) secondary to actually sitting down and developing the project. I always struggle with coming up with ideas, but once I have an idea, I can expand and grow what the project can be.

Organising My Thoughts/Ideas

I’m using and exploring the workspace tool Notion to help organise the currently written documentation, I can actually create multiple documents for various things, I can create the main documentation, create a features list documentation, design ideas documentation, etc, for example, very powerful for keeping clutter clean and organised. I enjoy this tool so much, I feel like moving away from Microsoft-Word or Google Docs and use Notion instead, otherwise it’s a massive book for a small project or a big project (I like writing and being as specific as I can in a project – but allow the project to naturally change if new ideas come up in the concept phase and if ideas come up that’ll be great to work on but requires a lot of time, I can create a document for that for future iterations of the project and work on them after I publish the project avoiding feature creep)

Testing

As mentioned at the start of this blog post, I want to build a prototype of this project, this is to get an idea of actually using the project rather than just the idea, as the quote goes, “an idea is as only as good as its execution”, meaning that the most amazing idea is worthless if it’s not executed effecticely, a concept isn’t enough, the implementation of that idea is where the magic is for a successful project. Not only to just see how it looks and feels, I want to get early feedback as soon as possible from the prototype stage, if people think there’s something in this project and I should continue it (obviously not yes people) then I can take their feedback on board when going into production of the project, I can add what worked and remove what didn’t work to make the development less hell, I don’t want to build this project to suddenly remove things I thought would work and spent a lot of time on building.

After the prototype testing, although I could keep the testing and feedback from people ongoing but once I go to the beta stage, I want to conduct a public beta testing. Where anyone can test the project for bugs or provide feedback. During the public beta, I can monitor the feedback and bug reports and make a list of priorities for them, allowing me to tackle the high priority stuff first, for example, a bug that crashes the application and low priority last.

Since this blog post is long enough, I’ll leave as this for now.