The First Change for Episode

Hello Creators,

Yesterday, we let you know that many changes are coming to Episode in the upcoming weeks and months. Today heralds our first change, although it’s a bittersweet one for us – we’re saying goodbye to the Mobile Creator :cry:

When we built the Mobile Creator in 2016, it was because we wanted to find a way to make storytelling on Episode easier for more of you. As many of you pointed out via the Creator Tools Survey, learning to create a visual story by writing donacode is like learning to code, and that can be a steep learning curve if that gets in the way of you being able to tell your story.

At the time, we were incredibly excited about where we could go with the Mobile Creator after we launched. However, the reality is that over the last couple of years, the pace at which we were able to update the Writer’s Portal has far exceeded our ability to keep up with those updates on the Mobile Creator. As one of our oldest features, even an update to the code base to get it compatible with our upcoming app changes takes a lot more effort and time on our part than it should.

Even though we also really wanted to give you Limelight, new animations, and other features you’ve asked for, when we took a step back and looked at the big picture, it didn’t feel right that making these changes could come at the expense of us working on other projects that you’ve also asked for.

That’s why we wanted to know HOW you worked – if we were to spend our time improving YOUR creator experience, then we also wanted to be able to make the most of the time that we have. Thanks to the incredible 400+ responses we received to our Creator Tools Survey, we discovered that:

  • About 86% of you work exclusively or mostly on a PC.
  • 97% of your time is spent on the Writer’s Portal when you’re working on your story.

In addition, your responses unanimously voiced your opinion that each feature available in the Mobile Creator is actually much easier to use on the Writer’s Portal.

For the 3% of you that told us you work exclusively on a mobile device, 78% of your peers indicated that they are likely to use a more mobile-friendly version of the Writer’s Portal. :exciting: It’s given us a new idea for how we might continue our mission to make it possible for ALL of your to tell the stories you want to tell on Episode.

Based on what we’ve learned, we are making plans to remove Mobile Creator from the app over the next few weeks. In the next couple of weeks, new players who install Episode will no longer unlock this feature once they are through the onboarding process. Later, we will remove Mobile Creator from the app for current players who already have access to it.

Note that this does NOT mean you’re losing access to the Create tab. Instead, we’re reverting the shelf back to what it was before; you just won’t be able to create a story directly from the Episode app anymore.

By removing the Mobile Creator, we hope to free up time and resources to explore new and existing features we want to develop and build. It gives us the space to ask ourselves what a more mobile-friendly version of the Writer’s Portal could be, and how that could best work all of you who only use mobile devices.

We know some of you will be sad to see it go, and we are too! However, we want to be able to invest in creating and supporting tools that are useful and helpful for the largest number of authors that we can, and we hope that you will continue to support us in this endeavor.

If you have feedback, comments or questions you can send in a support ticket or post below.

With love,

The Episode Team

PS - We know many of you are worried about it, so we want to clarify: we do NOT have any plans to remove either Classic or Ink from the app or portal.

UPDATE as of 6/27/19 Starting with the release of Episode 11.0 for Android only new players to Episode will not have access to Mobile Creator. For existing Android players, you must now sign in to your Episode account to be able to create new stories. This is to ensure that all mobile created stories get saved to Portal. Stay tuned for more updates in the coming weeks!

UPDATE #2 6/28/19 Unfortunately, we’ve uncovered a bug when turning off Mobile Creator for new players on version 11.0 of the Episode app. When exisiting players try to use Mobile Creator the game is crashing. In order to fix the issue we’ve made the difficult decision to remove Mobile Creator for all Android players on version 11.0 of the app. We were not planning to remove Mobile Creator from Android this soon and we are sorry for any trouble this causes. If you find you no longer have Mobile Creator in your Android app you can still access any stories you created by logging into the Writer Portal.

UPDATE #3 7/11/19 The day has come players. As of our content release on 7/10/19, Mobile Creator has officially been retired from Episode. You can still access any stories you created on your phone by logging into the Portal. It had a good run of nearly 3 years and its bittersweet to see it go.

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Bruh

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:scream:OMG…

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so we can still preview our stories on mobile, right?

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I feel like I’m the only person who doesn’t know how to write on mobile… Is it the create tap in the app? :sweat_smile:

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Yes! This will still be part of the Create section in the app.

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ok cool, thanks

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yes

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Ok, cool. So this means that we can’t write stories on mobile, but we can write on PC, and only preview on mobile and read stories on mobile app.

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Correct!

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Cool! Good enough for me! Thanks Liz!

@JosephEvans (don’t know if Joseph knows about it but I’ll just tag him anyway)

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Oop—

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Ah, well, this doesn’t affect me.
I feel sorry for those who don’t have availability to a computer though :fearful:

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Honestly, I could never figure out the Mobile Creator anyway :sweat_smile:

38 Likes

Yeah, this is a bit shocking but they will have to get to a laptop/computer.

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We will still be able to preview and direct through the mobile directing helper, correct?? :disappointed_relieved:

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It’s not as simple as that though. A lot of these people on the app are kids. Plus, computers aren’t cheap.

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Yep!

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Those people who write on the mobile creator can always just access the writer portal on a mobile. It’s more difficult since the screen is smaller but I do it and it works fine. Although I don’t think people would be comfortable with using a phone.

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Will the feed be available for everyone soon??? It’s been a while.

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