I was thinking about collaborative world building and story creation and the possibilities for creating collaborative interactive fiction using Inform 7, is it something that would work?
What I am looking for are any helpful suggestions, maybe anyone know of any on-line collaborative tools that are available or any ideas as to how collaborative IF could develop.
It’s been tried before here I was wondering if there was a way to hide the source code to prevent spoiling things for the players, maybe use something like ROT13?
Anyway, so after a quick search I came up with a couple of interesting websites, collaborative fictional world/story creation is out there.
I think any players who are brave enough to go trawling through the source code for answers deserve their spoilers. (And rot13 isn’t going to stop someone that determined.) Google has good ways to share ongoing projects, though.
Just as Slartibartfast enjoys creating coastlines (see below for those without ‘humourous sci-fi’ knowledge) some people might (and most likely do) enjoy creating locations for games, collaborative IF would give such persons an outlet for their talents.
I’m no expert at writing games, far from it, but I think I would enjoy adding small parts to a larger whole to help create something I could end up exploring and enjoy without ‘knowing’ everything about the game due to the fact I had created it all.
Nothing too ambitious, only a desire to see collaborative text adventures be given a chance in some way to develop. Just imagine Colossal Cave with new unexplored caves, now that really would be fun!
Quote from Wikipedia entry on Slartibartfast Slartibartfast is a Magrathean, and a designer of planets. His favourite part of the job is creating coastlines, the most notable of which are the fjords found on the coast of Norway on planet Earth.
No Wikipedia entry for Collaborative Interactive Fiction, guess it just doesn’t really ‘officially’ exist yet, apart from
Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), which may be considered as a kind of multiplayer or collaborative interactive fiction
There are different kinds of muds though – it’s common to think of them all has hack and slash goal oriented games but there is more variety than that.
I like implementing rooms and objects, and although writing the descriptions is hard, I do enjoy the challenge at trying my hand at literary prose. I’ve never finished a whole game since my buggy, incohesive Comp entry of 2005, because I’m not good at coming up with a design plan and sticking to it. I think I would enjoy participating in a loose collaboration like this.
I also think it would a lot of fun to be a builder for a MUD or a MUSH, especially a moderately roleplay-oriented one where the rooms need to convey atmosphere and background to provide a setting for the players to act in-character.
if the idea goes ahead, i could help (and i like to) writing room descriptions or maybe we should do a sketch first, about what the game would be, how we should approach to the player, if the game is a “nonsense-yet-lovely-get-the-key-or-solve-the-puzzle-game.” And if we can (efficiently) add dialogues often to the story and the game.
The collaborators could form two groups, those interested in implementing the map/model world, and those interested in creating the story, puzzles, and NPCs. This would probably work best if the implementation went forward in two stages. First the map team would get together and decide on a setting, whether it be a cavern system, a modern city block, a two-story house, an office building, an alien planet, or a medieval castle. Then the map team gets busy building the rooms and scenery objects, along with some non-scenery objects that would logically be present from the setting (perhaps including basic NPCs, such as wandering villagers or random office personnel). Then the story team would decide on a story that fits the setting and would implement all the objects and NPCs necessary to present the story, conflict, and interaction. They will have to decide whether or not to have difficult puzzles. The story team will probably also add narration to be triggered under different circumstances.
Or, maybe the two phases are undesirable, and everyone could work at once. I don’t know. There could also be a third team of programmers who will help both the map team and the story team with any advanced coding that needs to be done. I don’t think there should be a separate team of writers – the map and story people will take care of all the text.
Maybe the the programming team could be more general then that. They work on any technical or meta details as well as code. This might include multimedia in the game itself, or at least the cover art and bibliographic information, as well as a hint system, or even all menus in general.
I’d be up for helping with some large project, particularly if the project was broken down like you described in functional groups. I, for instance, like modelling objects and functionality and would be happy staying away from plots and descriptions for projects besides my own.
“The collaborators could form two groups, those interested in implementing the map/model world, and those interested in creating the story, puzzles, and NPCs.”
I’m a total noob with Inform 7 so I think I’d be more of a drag than wind but this way of doing a colab sounds good to me.