Week 3: Exploring the Art of Spectacle
Gob stood in awe as the adventurers unfurled parchment after parchment across the campfire. These weren’t battle plans or treasure maps, but sketches of colors, menus, and glowing shelves. “It must feel like a game,” Alecia said, tracing a finger over the drawings. Nick tightened a knot in the framework of their stage, making sure every plank fit. Peter whispered of legends past, borrowing bits of wonder from faraway worlds. Gob didn’t quite understand it all, but he could feel it: the stage was becoming more than a grid. It was becoming alive.
This week, the team focused on shaping StageMaster’s identity — both visually and structurally. We explored how the UI can feel game-like without overshadowing creators’ stories, introduced scene management and asset placement in development, and mapped out design directions inspired by video games and tabletop adventures. The result? A clearer picture of how StageMaster will balance spectacle and usability while giving creators freedom to tell their stories.
Team Highlights
Alecia and Peter dug deep into the UX challenge of balancing creative flexibility with approachability. A creative tool must offer many functions — scene editing, asset placement, branching paths — but too many options risk overwhelming new users. The interface must respect users’ content while still sparking delight. The solution is to borrow from game UIs that encourage exploration without clutter. As Alecia put it, “A big menu of tools should feel like an invitation, not a barrier.”
Alecia ran a visual audit of games like Baldur’s Gate, Root, and Stardew Valley, asking questions about texture, density, and style. She also built UI scales to help translate Peter’s vision into a concrete design system. Peter dove into UI inspiration, emphasizing “StageMaster is about spectacle and fun, but doesn’t want to obstruct the user’s story,” Peter explained. “It’s got to respect and support the user’s content, without being totally bland.”
Meanwhile, Nick advanced the stage framework with technical upgrades: drag-and-drop asset placement, path-to-scene linking, and consistent background rendering. His focus was on maintaining cross-component reliability, so that interactions feel natural across the platform. “The goal is for users to have enough flexibility to tell their story in their own way,” Nick said, “without the platform ever becoming convoluted or overwhelming.”
What We Did
Conducted a visual UI audit of video and board games—Heroes of Might and Magic, Baldur’s Gate, Animal Crossing, The Sims, Slay the Spire, Archon Soul, Root, Hades, Legend in the Mist, Stardew Valley, Hollow Knight, Don’t Starve, Mansions of Madness, and more
Built mood boards and UI scales to define visual spectrum for StageMaster’s design system
Improved stage framework with asset placement and sizing
Implemented asset placement on the stage (characters and creatures) with support for different sprite sizes
Enabled saving, updating, and removing of character/creature positions
Added scene creation and management within paths
Added story workflow to create new stories, paths, and scenes with a structured data model
Developed first pass of an asset management page and selector for staging assets
Updated background ratio handling for consistency across scenes
Improved side panel behavior (focus loss and refresh states)
Refined library card formatting and default background behavior
Pulled out several components for better composition and stricter type usage
Where We’re Headed
Looking ahead, development will focus on scene navigation, styling initial UI components, and deployment setup. On the design side, Alecia will begin crafting UI assets such as stylized borders and repeatable textures to bring visual character without heavy image loads. The focus is on balancing clarity and playfulness: building a tool that feels welcoming, intuitive, and game-like, while still giving creators the space to shape ambitious stories.
We’re also beginning to explore deployment strategies. Scalability is a key concern: the platform must handle different types of user load, from casual creators experimenting with a single story to communities hosting larger, asset-heavy campaigns. We’re evaluating hosting, containerization, and CI/CD pipelines that can support rapid iteration now while scaling smoothly later.
