Remember the first time you heard about Dwarf Fortress? I sure do. I can remember my inner monologue going something like "Seriously? The game lets me do ALL THAT??" A versatile simulation that is rich in content. That is what Dwarf Fortress is to me, and it makes for some of the best gameplay I've experienced.
But I also like to create, and this post is written to everyone in the DF community that loves to design and flesh out interesting new ideas: How about getting together and creating a World Design Wiki?
A World Design WikiA wiki where everyone from programmers to enthusiasts can contribute in a structured way towards a common goal: That of providing good input to future games. What does a World Design Wiki contain? Well, anything that describes various aspects of simulating a world:
- Biomes
- Geology
- Flora, from generics to specific plants
- Fauna
- Weather
- How animals should behave
- Terrain generation approaches
- Genetics
- Mechanics
- Industry and resources: What everything can be used to make
- Combat
- Fluids
- +++
The list could go on and on. Anything from mostly informational articles such as descriptions of various metals and how they are of interest to games, to highly technical ones, such as a procedure for simulating water. Everything, of course, with a focus on various levels of abstraction: An article on how to simulate combat could begin with a "One number" abstraction (that is, combating units destroy eachother based on a single "strength" number) and follow up with sections of increasing detail, perhaps topped off with a list of combat abilities/traits.
The benefitsThe obvious benefit for everyone in the DF community is that all the great suggestions everyone has can be written down in a more productive environment. While forums are great for discussing and tossing ideas back and forth, a lot of potentially awesome stuff will fade into obscurity. A wiki allows ideas to graduate into articles of higher quality and in a format that is easy to reference. The DF Suggestions forum would still be the place to throw around any idea that comes to mind. The wiki would act as an extra tool to store and structure information worth keeping.
A second great benefit is that other game developers can use the wiki. We don't mind more games that implement awesome simulations, do we? The entire idea of a wiki actually came to me when I, as a programmer, pondered about writing a simulation and realized just how much effort I would have to lay down in order to produce anything nearly as good as Dwarf Fortress. A wiki such as this will allow us to work together to spread our ideals of versatile and interesting game worlds by making a great resource for any game developer.
And let's not forget just how plain fun it is to design stuff for it's own sake.
It's up to you, reallyI'm excited about the possibilities, but more importantly, are you? A good wiki can only come out of the combined effort of motivated people, so the question is: Are you people interested in starting a wiki like this?
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Topic: Would you be interested in designing a world? (Read 1669 times)