Ok guys, this one I really need your feedback and thoughts before we tackle this.
In general, this is the vibe that I’m getting:
- Have all the basic kupop functionality
- Map generator sounds like a cool idea, having the framework detect things and add them to the map sounds awesome.
- It needs to at least host a Kupop60WR interactive story
- Possibly built to host standalone stories, or be a hub for such stories.
Now, to further the vision a little, Matt had mentioned that me and him had met at one point about building an updated Silver, and the features we’d like to incorporate into it. A mapmaker functionality was one of the things, but this expands on that idea by making it more dynamic. Overall, the discussion revolved around combining a few key features into the build: the wiki, the map concept, and a new interactive timeline. These features would all interact with each other and bring a very cool new dynamic in how to explore the interactive world.
So let’s say you create a character, let’s call him Paul Figgy. You can go to the built in-wiki section and create Mr. Figgy, or the framework will notice the use of caps when you post the story and prompt you to make a stub for him at that point. Either way, when that story is posted, there is now a annotated list in the wiki of stories that feature our friend Paul. if you don’t mention him by name, you can tag ol’ Figgs to the post at a later date.
When you write the post, it’ll tag it with the date in kupopolis years, say July 8th, 60 WR. You could also place a custom date if its something that’s slightly older or perhaps something slightly ahead–we all know the date is a bit fuzzy in general. We’d also put in a location for the story, “Moogle Quarter, Kupopolis” and that would also get tagged to Paul so we’d have a location for him story wise.
Then with the map feature we can follow Paul’s journey, Indiana Jones style. We can make the map track multiple characters–see where they interact, where they part, easily find and read the stories that pertains to them no matter that location they are in. You’d be able to see the map of the world as if it were airplane flight paths, each destination a story you can click and read.
This wouldn’t just be for characters, but for everything we have in the wiki–places, objects, organizations, concepts, etc. When you view it in the wiki, you’d see info about the element as it pertains in the story, automatically added as people write about it.
The timeline feature by itself would be a summary for each post placed on a timeline to give a sense of how much time passes between stories. This way we can visually see what goes on, and what coexists at the time in the story (for example, the Nation state of Hill’s existence when compared to the history of Tasnica). We’d also be able to add historical milestones for references not directly mentioned in the story posts themselves but are mentioned in the new wiki system.
The other feature I’d like to add would be the writer’s ability to construct lists of posts to create anthologies. These anthologies could be anything from plot arcs to key points in a location’s history. This way as the story expands, you don’t have to drag your feet through a backlog of hundreds of posts to contribute, you’d already have a accessible lists of posts important to what you want to write about.
How does that all sound? Of course, this would be an big, big build, and would take some time to get done. But it’s pretty much the vision I had for a while.