We're headed to the Main App Store

And everything else new in Doodle Board

We’ve been busy. Next week Doodle Board will graduate the App Lab and enter the App Store as an “Early Access” app.

This post will share some updates, celebrate some milestones, and will include a resource you can use yourself if you’re considering entering your own VR app into the store.

Updates!! 

There’s a long list since our last post, including:

1. 6 player co-op

2. Night mode and passthru mode

3. Live, scheduled co-op events

4. Word search puzzles

5. Updated app store page 

I’d like to specifically call out 6 player and night/passthru.

6 player mode 

A monumental leap after our prior objectives of supporting 2- and 3-player rooms!

Superficially this looks like simply updating a backend variable from a “3” to an “6”, but for this change to be effective numerous other building blocks needed to be set in place, including:

1. Performance Testing: Would the app support this much live activity without lag?

2. Functional Testing: Would putting 6+ players in a room create too much distraction? Would player avatars obstruct the board?

3. User Testing: Do people who use or want to use Doodle Board actually want this?

4. Risk Management: What could go wrong with so many users in a room together, and how do we stay ahead of it?

To understand the situation, we’ve interviewed early users & potential users, and ran a couple of larger events. Feedback’s been positive — in fact some want the room even bigger to support different functions like team-wide standups or classroom settings.

We explored many other apps to understand how they’ve treated large Co-Op and see what emergent behaviors happen and what to look out for. 

One not-surprising result was the need for Crowd control tools like banning or muting someone. Sometimes this is urgent to defend against bad behavior… but more often it just helps when someone doesn’t realize the traffic in the background is a little too noisy.

We found that users naturally gravitated to make space for everyone in the room to see the board, so we relaxed our concern about board obstruction. One very pleasant surprise: Some users positioned themselves above & below other players, leveraging our grip-movement to adjust their resting height. This wouldn’t be possible in most other VR apps which insist on full-body avatars (not to mention impossible in meat space), but in Doodle Board it affords larger crowds the ability to comfortably occupy a more intimate space.

Night Mode & Passthru Mode

Night Mode began as a “juice” exercise: Something relatively fun and relatively unassociated with any particular product or business objective. We leverage this in a way that’s probably pretty similar to the “20% time” famous in the early Google days.

Night mode led to Passthru mode, which… may as well be an entirely different app based on how much the experience shifts as you toggle from our forest clearing to your living room.

And anything that makes spending time with pets more accessible we’ll mark in the *WIN* column : )

Ultimately: 8P and Night/Passthru are important milestones for making our core utility more useful and accessible — just in time for our discovery to open up once we arrive in the main App Store.

Speaking of milestones…

Milestones

Last quarter, Doodle Board surpassed 100 MAU 🎊

The number simultaneously feels extraordinary, and minuscule! 

We’ve seen early indicators of Product-Market Fit, including:

1. Users have provided unsolicited suggestions and positive feedback

2. At least one emergent use of the app, when two players shared that they used the board to imagine and enact army battles with one another

It’s thrilling that the fundamentals of a blank canvas & relaxing space empowered users to do their own thing. We’re humbled that so many people would try out and continue to use an app made by a tiny dev shop like our own.

Free Resource: App Store Requirements Overview

Meta’s App Lab requirements are exhaustive, and sometimes its links point in circles. Here’s a copy of the Google Doc I created & used to keep track of everything. I found it far easier to consolidate docs to be read & checked-off chronologically, while leaving Strictly & myself room for notes and specific calls-to-action. If you’ve got a VR app that’s NOT in the Quest Store yet, hopefully this helps get you on your way!! And feel free to DM us if you need a hand — we think a rising tide raises all boats, and more VR apps make the ecosystem better for everyone : ) 

The Road Ahead

A theme we’ve decided for the next few months will be to look at onboarding & churn. Or in other words: making the new user experience even breezier.

A core tenet of our app is ease of use: We should get out of your way so that when an idea’s burning your mind, or you’re hustling to make your meeting on-time, we’re not throwing you any hurdles.

• We aspire for parity with Zoom, which boasts meeting links you open in one click and join (after checking your audio/video) in two

• We know some users are gaming veterans (VR or otherwise) while others are very new, and we want to best support both

• We’ve added a number of useful features and want to be sure you’re aware of all the good stuff we offer!

• … but we’re also malaised by overwrought onboarding How-Tos, and aspire to steer very clear of anything patronizing or longwinded

We have a full product development queue. We have far greater qualitative & quantitative understandings of our users. Now we’ll get to work!