Strategies for working with a graphic designer

Anvil Q&A
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I’ve built an app in Anvil which I’m very happy with (it’s an AI-powered game, https://infiniteworlds.app).

It looks as good as I can make it with my limited graphic design abilities. However when I shared it with a game marketing company, they said that they think the appearance will severely hinder its uptake. On comparing it to a competitor (https://aidungeon.com/), I have to say that theirs looks enormously better.

Fair enough - I have no training in graphic design or web design, so it’s not surprising that my website looks sub-professional.

I’m now wondering what might be the best way to work with someone to upgrade the appearance of my site. My thought was to hire a professional graphic designer / web designer and have them build a more beautiful site, and then use the custom html/css and somehow integrate it with the functionality of my app. It seems a bit tricky as most web designers want to use SquareSpace or one of its competitors.

So I guess I have a few questions. Answers to any or all much appreciated!

  • Does anyone have any experience of a similar situation that they can share? I guess anyone wanting to make a consumer-facing app may eventually run into a situation like this.

  • Am I right in thinking that SquareSpace/WordPress etc would not be helpful?

  • My current thought is to get a graphic designer to make some mock-ups of how it might look, choose one, then get someone who knows html/css to implement it. Does that sound sane?

  • Any technical tips on how to integrate a beautiful html page with my app’s functionality?

Thanks!

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I can’t help with your question, but this is exactly what I have just started to map out!

I love adventure games (from the old Level 9 days) and MUDs (from Essex Uni days) and I always thought that an AI driven one would remove the “guess the verb” annoyance that dissuaded so many people from playing them

We might just get a resurgence :slight_smile:

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Yes, that’s exactly my thought! Give it a go and let me know how you find it!

GPT-4 is slow today for some reason, so it might be a bit slow going.

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Yeah it’s quite slow. Might try again later today. How do you keep gpt4 to a narrative? Maybe not for this thread (I’m hijacking it) but I’d love to know more about how you are doing this. Maybe I can message you?

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I’m happy to answer here. Basically each message to GPT4 is something like “We are playing a text adventure. Here is the setting: {setting}, and these are the details of my character: {character}. The history of the adventure is as follows: {history}. My next action is: {action}. Please write what happens next.”

There’s quite a lot of fine-tuning the prompt on top of that, but that’s the general idea.

‘history’ in this context is initially just a bunch of “My action was this, and this was the outcome”. After a while however it gets too long, so I have to make a separate call to gpt4 to summarise the adventure so far. Doing that without giving the player the feeling that the game has amnesia is an interesting challenge.

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Nice. I really must give this a go. Seeing your project as got me excited!

What I was thinking was broadly a standard text adventure with puzzles, but a free form parser that categorises the user’s input. Those categories map broadly to verb-noun actions. This would allow me to control the narrative but give the impression of free choice and remove most of the verb-noun guessing.

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I understand that a lot of the fun comes from building things yourself, but if you can see a big way of making things better which I have missed, please let me know!

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That sounds like a good way to go. Have you seen this example? A fully-featured ticketing system, built with Anvil In that one they implement custom HTML to make a beautiful looking app, so you’ll get some pointers on the how-to side of things that’ll probably help when you’re getting someone to write the html/css for it.

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