Tales, Codex and Arena are 3 of the ~15 apps we had in mind at Harpy. Tales was a play-by-post platform, Codex was a World builder (and Campaign manager) and Arena was our brand new Virtual Tabletop (VTT).
Next would have been Hatch, our Character sheet app. Party, our group finder. Melee, our battle/encounter simulator. Store, our own Marketplace. Draft, some kind of Miro for TTRPG players and GMs. Gears, our Inventory system. And much more.
With that much app ideas we wanted 2 things:
- The ability for our users to use one app without the others (for instance our VTT with D&D Beyond character sheets, our group finder with FoundryVTT or our encounter simulator with Roll20). There are so many different TTRPG alternative apps out there that it felt like the right thing to do.
- A great user experience, where we only show the users what they actually need. You want to play on a Virtual Tabletop? Fine, use Arena. We won’t show you our play-by-post platform to make things clearer. But you’ll be able to easily switch to it with the same account in 2 clicks if you need.
So why removing those app names?
First, marketing is hard. Creating a brand identity is hard. And people were confused. Are you Harpy? Are you Tales? What’s Codex? With that much different names, it was very hard for us to communicate. We were losing what we wanted the most for our users: Clarity.
Then, having 15 app ideas is great but we’re a very small team, working part-time on this huge project. Those 15 apps wouldn’t be made in a year. So in the meantime we were using a complex architecture for a future UX way different than our current one.
So what does it mean for Harpy?
Well, not that much actually. Everything will be available in the top nav and you won’t have to switch between apps anymore. We won’t communicate on Arena, Tales or Codex anymore. Instead we’ll talk about our VTT, our play-by-post platform and… our codex. Yeah we still call that part a codex though. But it’s not a “brand” anymore.
What about the future app ideas?
We’re still planning on doing them. This project is so much fun. We’ll just integrate them as elegantly as possible inside Harpy when the time comes. Also we still keep in mind a very special application idea that could come up one day. This application would allow you to create your own Harpy application by using any component of the other ones. Creating your layout and playing lego with our stuff. That way, people could use only what they need. But we’re not there yet.
Conclusion
So that’s it. It’s just Harpy now. We hope this decision will make our communication easier in the future. If you have any question, feel free to post them below. Otherwise, check our latest update 15.3.0 where we added a full blown video chat with audio sharing, polls and breakout rooms inside Harpy!
