Descent of the Durtle into eGoooott - NOW AT B8!

Hey @magiconic! How’s it going? :smiley:

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Great! Discourse decided to e-mail me about all of the new posts tonight so I decided to re-look at it just in case it progressed.
I’m still doing Japanese too, so I don’t even feel bad commenting on here after a multi-month hiatus

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Why is it so hard to make an app? (Serious question).

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Hard to what extent? Hard from a programming standpoint? graphical? just, overall?

Yeah, like, if they already have the site working and know how that works, what makes it especially difficult to translate into app form? It’s not like etoeto where they are/were trying to invent some entirely new learning method. Is it just experience? Or completely different coding languages that make them have to rebuild everything from scratch? Just curious as to why they would go back to the drawing board.

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I don’t know how hard it is in general, but they had some pretty annoying bugs that required them to completely change the design of the app. So, basically, start from scratch. They decided it was reason enough to pause the project. They did post a job offer for someone to keep working on it. Obviously, they want to get someone to be fully focused on the project instead of diluting the work efforts of the core team.

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(I haven’t looked too much into WK’s tech so this is going to be a general answer)

There are ways to use web code to build out mobile apps, but you can also build them native for each platform which requires different coding languages. There’s a few things that could influence your decision - things like taking advantage of device features that aren’t available via web APIs, design considerations, and sometimes things like performance, but on the flip side if you build using something like React Native (I think the WK reviews use React…) you can use the same codebase across Android and iOS. So whicever approach they took, it could have been they hit up against something technical or strategic and decided to change tack on that front, which would require a rebuild.

You’d likely use the same underlying infrastructure if so (as in any database and APIs that can be used to request/update etc the data - e.g. get all items in the latest review set), so it’d be more about the software people interact with. So also on that front it’s also possible that they wanted to radically overhaul the design, which could be another reason to start again.

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OR… The deal with the Durtle Devil or the Anti-Crab or whomever fell through… Just sayin’.

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Speaking of that, did we ever get a “making of” documentary, “behind the scenes of the Durtle Heaven puzzle”? Because I still think eGoooott was somehow an accident.

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Oh, I’m quite certain it was. How can you take a page covered almost entirely in various different letters, and not be able to make an actual English word out of it?

Honestly, I’m still of the opinion that all ten of the books should have produced sensible English words. It wouldn’t have been any more difficult to write the puzzle, but would have made the solution somewhat less immediately apparent. And more elegant.

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Personally, I think people were aiming their sights a little too high for the descent.

They seemed to want some sort of badass durtle boss-fight instead of a wanikani feature.

But, well, we’re on WaniKani, not in a Durtle RPG. WaniKani App beta made sense as an end.

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Hey if Wendy’s can come out with an RPG, what’s stopping Tofugu?

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Feeling very attacked right now

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I don’t know anything about Challenge Ratings really, and I just kind of threw most of the numbers together, but I had to give this a go:

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Fricking neat!

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Holy shit. That is going to be the BBEG in my player’s game so cool.

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Sheer awesomeness

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I say. In sixteen days, it’ll be this thread’s first birthday.

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Can we reach 10000 posts until that?
9000 would be cool, too.

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