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Mindstream's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall | #9 | 2.833 | 2.833 |
Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
I think the idea of exploring textual UI/UX through spatiotemporal dimensions and almost tosafotic tree-ring formats is still under-explored and could be quite promising!
When it comes to critical feedback I'd say I'm not sure the proof of concept program sells the vision; ie I'm not sure I would use it personally until some clearly fun/useful mechanism was shown. Until then it comes across as potentially interesting, but not clearly so, especially given we live in a world with many textual interfaces like threads (reddit, twitter, etc), personal note taking systems like obsidian, etc. that can also allow us to revisit old posts and connect them usefully to new ones, etc. I personally leave this pitch not knowing to well how I would use the first proposal / program and to what use / effect. However I can imagine the second long term pitch pokemon go for text being very interesting!(this also suggests another short term in-road might be a better system to boostrap the long term vision).
I'd advise Sunrise to work on a better sell of the system before expecting to get others to collaborate with it; although the pokemon go for text/thought is quite compelling so that might be enough of a pitch!
When it comes to developing an MVP, maybe make it a plugin for obsidian to leverage the open source code and community behind it and to maximize the change of faster and larger adoption which would help the stated goal of helping people accelerate the win condition (just an example; but I am a biased obsidian user, and it might be possible to quickly spin up a better solo version using LLMs + dedicated team).
specifically, the plugin / mod option for obsidian or other textual note systems / sites might be a good way to boostrap by lowering adoption friction in a high switching cost enviroment. maybe a browser extension that pings the user in these loops, and can embed itself or extract from social media too etc.
I really like how evocative this part is "Imagine Pokemon Go, except you go around down to see what thoughts you can find. A chatlog for life which you can use to leave notes anywhere in the world, but specifically for others in the same time and space." - definitely the best part of your pitch.
I do wonder if you'll have a density problem here - what's your expected user scale, and the expected concentration of users, to make this a fun experience? but this seems solveable if you focus launch on particular cities first, potentially.
But definitely a fun project to think about and I can see it creating something valuable for people!
Thank you for the feedback on what is most evocative! And thank you for the very practical feedback on density.
Density is definitely a problem. This ideally wants to be a social network, but gaining meaningful adoption for a social network is difficult. Of course every user is *also* their own fellow user within the same locality and so could at least talk with their own past self (if they so desire, haha...), and also all global users also constitute another locality, though not as immediate of one. I think even seven users on the global scale could make for an interesting experience since it would basically be a message room except you see from where messages are being sent. Users could set the radius for the messages that they want to see. As soon as there are enough users within a certain radius, one could start looking at the conversation happening more immediately around themselves. For the fully realized idea of sitting down at a park bench and being able to read the messages that someone left there exactly there last week... this would be quite far off even with a relatively successful implementation, and maybe only possible in places like New York City where there are many famous everyday landmarks. A more realistic middle ground is seeing what people within a few tens of kilometers of you have been thinking about, since even though this is not a trivial distance to travel it still is traveled often enough that different places in one's everyday life (like work vs. home) would expose one to a different pool of voices.
perhaps a naive implementation solution would be for the radius to auto-scale based on density - I wonder if there's some interestingly evocative user experience here, if you could see a distance-direction-time vector which showed the distance in spacetime in the UI in a phenomenologically rich way somehow (with colour or size or something...) - then the "feel" of the density becomes part of the experience of what the user is experiencing. Using the app in a dense place lets you feel proximity, using the app in a sparse place lets you feel distance
I think this idea was really cool: ""Imagine Pokemon Go, except you go around down to see what thoughts you can find. A chatlog for life which you can use to leave notes anywhere in the world, but specifically for others in the same time and space. Similar to airdropping, but across time? ""
It reminds me of the old 3ds game "Find Mii". Would be really cool
I don't really get the first part ("layered sprints"). Similar to how I will copy a summary from the chat log with my favorite llm, and then start a new chat?
I think if you are able to get it set up to be multiplayer and gamified, it could be a fun game or experience
Okay, I'm not completely and entirely sure I understand what you're pitching, but I do think some of the concepts are really interesting. The idea of having an app which localizes text publishing sure is interesting, letting people send their thoughts out with a location and a timestamp. If enough people were using it, might be interesting to observe the anonymous thoughts of various localities. I'm not sure how you'd scale to more users, as it seems pretty niche, something that might only interest fun weirdos. But, with sufficiently large spatial connections, that might be fine!
I really didn't get what the "talk to yourself in layered sprints" part. I played with the tool, and I suppose it was a new idea, I just didn't really get the point. Maybe something similar could be applied in the main app, though, like having thoughts "echo" every 24h?
Overall interesting thought.
Ohhh I think I understand this. I'm sure you have more use cases in mind but for some reason it made me think of a geocache log. Like, while you're still looking for the cache but you're close by enough that you're getting the previous cache finder's thoughts in your feed?
(Went back and read the description again) YEAH THIS COULD BE COOL