Datapad
Mobile Worldbuilding App
Tools
Flutter Android
Timeline
2025 - Present
Description
An app for creating and organizing worldbuilding content.
Context
An app meant for creatives/DMs/anyone to create, organize, and manage worldbuilding information. Intended mainly for use by writers to organize their stories and characters, or DMs to manage their TTRPG campaigns. Currently in closed beta testing.
Problem
Existing tools which allow for similar functionality are either web-only (not mobile friendly), or require expensive subscriptions. In addition, most offerings are clunky and don't offer an immersive UI and intuitive UX. So, the main things I wanted to accomplish with this app were:
Immersive UI with customization
Powerful organization options
Full editing capabilities
Process
For the immersive UI with customization, I decided to lean into the retro sci-fi look. I designed it to resemble a datapad from Star Wars (hence the app name). This included interesting button shapes, retro colors, blocky fonts, etc. In addition, I added some fun animations on page change, using cryptic custom fonts that appear to be decoded as the page loads. It ends up being a pretty cool effect. For customizability, I made all aspects of the UI settings that the user can change - colors, fonts, timing, and enable/disable for all major features and pages.
For the organizational options, I developed a tag system that the user can use to tag locations, characters, items, whatever. These tags can then be used on the main menu to create flat or nested folder structures which display entries in the searchable codex. The end result is a pretty intuitive and easy experience for finding any of your content.
For powerful editing capabilities, I styled each "entry" as basically a Wikia-style page. Each portion is able to be edited/modified individually. For the main content section, I created a full Markup editor (and associated renderer on the show pages). I also extended the Markup renderer/editor to allow linking to other pages within the app with an intuitive system, to allow for wiki-like link navigation.
