The quality of life improvements for the canvas UI over the years made the experience for this year’s canvas event incredible! I virtually had no complaints for the core features save for the buggy pixel cooldown timer, which was fixed later on. The best feature about this year was the addition of cursors, which really brought the canvas to life, plus it helped strangers coordinate with the pixel placements and also communicate with each other through gestures.

Here are my suggestions for improvements for the next year’s canvas event:

1. Make the template feature more intuitive: The current UI for adding templates through the URL was not obvious initially. Ideally the cotemplate feature should be integrated with the canvas UI instead of being in a separate webpage. If not possible, then at least add an option to display a short guide on using templates.
2. Allow non-team members to access other teams’ templates: It was difficult assisting other users with their art since I didn’t have access to their template (or I didn’t know that I did). Even if I’m not in a team, I should at least have a read-only access to use other teams’ templates on my own. It’s only after the event finished that I got to know that I could’ve used other teams’ templates after all, even though I did spent considerable time in the website trying to figure out how. I guess this should be clubbed under 1.
3. Add coordination-centric reactions for cursors: The cursor reactions feature could be extended so you could communicate with other users directly with your cursor for coordination without actually having to text others. You could add emojis like thumbs up, thumbs down etc, tool icons like pencil, erase, fill etc, and even directional symbols like arrows pointing vertically, horizontally, diagonally etc.
4. Add option to only place pixels on left mouse click: It was only later in the event that I realised that I was placing pixels even while right-clicking which I had reserved for moving through the canvas, wasting pixels in the process and possibly littering other users’ art. It would be better to have control over how pixel placement has to be triggered.

A preview of the emotes on the keybinds list would be good

The keybind explanations aren’t particularly descriptive and it would be good if there were better descriptions for the reactions in particular, maybe even with a preview of each. Other than that, the event was great. Thanks.

I have the feeling that people are botting, especially the bronies. Anyone else has the same feeling, or are there just so many of them that they always immediately react if you paint over their stuff?

During the event I saw some other cursors do some reactions/emojis, but couldn’t figure out how they were doing it. Only just now did I realize the keybinds window in the settings was scrollable, where I found that the emojis were just the number keys.

I think for next year, it’d be helpful to have a How-to new user guide near the Share, Settings, Chat, and dark/light mode buttons. Something that pops up a window that basically gives a quick rundown of the essential things a new user should know to have a good experience, like letting them know that long-pressing lets you know who placed a pixel (only discovered that toward the end), how to do reactions, etc. Nothing too overwhelming or info-dense, just the essentials.

The template didn’t seem to work very well, even when i made my own 1-to-1 pixel art version. To get that one to the right size, it blurred pixels together and was also still offset (though that might have been my zoom, I didn’t realize until later). The picture and file were tiny, but when i put the URL, the picture was huge on the canvas so I had to scale it down which blurred the pixels together.

I loved the cursors, they were so much fun! I wish emojis were bigger and I wish there was a toggle to show the keybinds (and previews) at the bottom or something. It took me forever just to know they existed.