Non-update!I caught some really good suggestions in the #3 survey recently:
I'd try to find a more consistent way of placing out of character stuff; some parts end up at the top, some at the bottom, some mixed in, and sometimes there will be something that looks like an update post at first glance but is entirely OoC questions. It's good to be able to put your notes wherever you want, and those reading everything anyway will just be confused once or twice, but it's something I would find uncomfortable until I found a good thread-standard.
The format of the posts is nearing completion, but this person's got a point. It's sometimes pretty difficult to tell updates from non-updates, especially when there are pictures involved in the latter. From this point on, I'll solidify the format of updates into three segments.
1) At the very top, there will be a thin header. Maybe it's an image or maybe just a really recognizable piece of text, but it will denote game updates from other things. Right under this will be the first slew of used suggestions as usual.
2) The main content of the post will come after that.
3) Finally, the relevant spoilers. In order of importance: Party/Inventory, Storage, Relevant Content (this is a new thing I'm going to be doing to help long-time readers - in case something is referenced, I might link to it under Relevant Content, much like how comic books say "*Batman's infamous wedding can be seen in Issue 232."), and finally, GM Notes.
Maybe some kind of way of identifying inventory items so we don't have to guess their name or dig through everything in the page 1 master list? Like, each item could be numbered?
This is something I've struggled with for a while. On one hand, it's tricky because each item has so much content in it that its menu alone takes up about the size of a character's inventory. On the other hand, even I often forgot what an item's exact effects are. On the other other hand, the visual representation of item menus is something that allows subtle suggestions as to what's possible (the whole red/green option thing, for example: Riltia's primary class skill could be quite overpowered if the players were willing to pay 8 SP total to nullify the lockdown effect).
Another problem is this: Flash is a pile of slow horseshit for loading large .fla files. I swear, editing, saving and exporting the inventory takes 5+ minutes for the smallest changes, and fiddling with it forever until everything is aligned right really gets on my nerve.
I'm still thinking on a format to gracefully solve all these problems at once. Nothing will change until there's a format most people would appreciate. The only main downside is a newer, more accessible format might have formatting issues when viewed on phones.
Reuse the first post as an index.
This is a comment that's come up once in a while on the surveys, and there's a few reasons it's not happening.
-Monk12's already doing a great job as it is. His indexing keeps the updates from slowing down even further.
-By the end of the game, I'm going to struggle to fit all the spoiler content we already have in the OP due to word limits anyway
-While there will probably never be an official Warrens video game
*, I'm likely going to package the game into a more easily-readable format once it's over anyway.