🚀 Turning Writing into a Game

Hey dev community! I’m building an AI writing companion that gamifies the storytelling process, and whew – what a journey it’s been. As a first-time founder working with a remote dev team, I’ve learned some hard lessons about scope creep that I want to…


This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Virgil Storymaster

Hey dev community! I'm building an AI writing companion that gamifies the storytelling process, and whew - what a journey it's been. As a first-time founder working with a remote dev team, I've learned some hard lessons about scope creep that I want to share.

The vision seemed simple: create an AI sidekick that turns writing into a game-like experience. Characters would level up like RPG heroes, relationships would branch like dialogue trees, and plot points would unlock like achievements. Cool, right?

But here's where things got messy:

  • Skipped the crucial discovery phase in our excitement to start building
  • Feature creep started sneaking in as we tried to perfect the user experience
  • Remote team communication gaps led to misaligned expectations
  • Technical debt accumulated as we rushed to implement "just one more feature"

The biggest lesson? As a first-time founder, I should have:

  • Created a detailed product specification document before starting development
  • Set clear MVP boundaries and stuck to them
  • Established better communication protocols with the remote team
  • Focused on core features before adding "nice-to-haves"

Currently, we're taking a step back to reorganize and prioritize. The vision of gamifying writing is still there, but we're being more methodical about how we get there.

Would love to hear from other founders who've dealt with scope creep, especially when building creative tools. How did you manage feature creep while staying true to your product vision?

Anywho, subscribe to the newsletter to check out the Alpha Chatbot here: www.freewrtr.com
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This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Virgil Storymaster


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