Just yesterday morning there was nothing called Pocket Dota 2 and all of a sudden we seem to have a pretty big project on our hands.
I was just sitting there going through some stuff when Nick (LostENT) messaged me on Facebook telling me that he had a free weekend and that he wanted to work on some tiny application for the iOS that had something to do with Dota 2. We got started on what he could do and the conversation went on and on about how much could be done in a application if worked on properly. I do not remember how we got to point but I decided to make a mock draft for him so he could have something to go by when he began working on it.
Home ScreenI got down to making something in Photoshop and ended up with what you see on the right hand side. I showed it to Nick and he loved the concept and this is where I decided to take things a step further. While it was just a preview, I posted the image up to the lovely Reddit community to find out what they thought of it and ways in which we could improve. As always, the community did not disappoint.
They seemed to have loved the idea just as much as we did and started filling us with their ideas, suggestions and requests. When you get such support, you only get more pumped up to pull the project ahead and I started designing other elements of the application. We ended up with quite a few. You can take a look at them after the break.
But designing concepts and ideas was one thing but able to recreate the same in the form of a working application was an entirely different story. The UI elements of our design were very different from the traditional elements provided for usage by Apple so I was not really sure if we could pull off the same in the app itself. But Nick got down to it immediately and what we managed to achieve on the very first day is just brilliant in my own personal opinion.
It’s just been slightly over 24 hours since we started designing the app and we already have an alpha build of it. The best part being – the app works EXACTLY like previewed in the mocks. At the moment we have a fully working Home Screen and Hero List. The application is optimized for the new iPhone 5 and also older versions such as the iPhone 4. We are planning on getting started with the hero profiles and content pages tomorrow and hope to get them done as soon as possible. We will be working on one section after the other and I will post up threads for anyone interested to pour in their suggestions and feedback which is so appreciated.
We are currently working only on an iOS version but the request for an Android version has been insanely high. Quite a few Android developers have actually contacted me already volunteering to port the same idea on the Android. I haven’t responded to them yet but I will get back to them and see if we can get things going for that platform too. But before I actually do that, I want to get some more design elements in place so we have a good base to work on.
Once we have a good amount of content set up and some more features running, we’ll put out a testing period for anyone who is willing to help us test the application. We will be able to not only get rid of the bugs but also have some user input on what the application should provide.