November was dedicated to internal infrastructure. We chose a wiki engine to have internal game’s manual published and decided to install a forum software. To tie that all into working system we put work into single sign-on system. In short once you logged into game you would have access to game’s forum and internal wiki without going through additional verification process. As a consequence those are inaccessible until you log into the game. That is good for forums but we might change our mind about the wiki.
The IC / OOC forum split
More to the point we decided to have in character and out of character not merely separate boards within the same forum. This allows us to log in a player into OOC forum using game account but use currently played character in IC forum. We hope for clean separation between IC and OOC actions. It should not be apparent which player leads which in-game character. Note that if you retire a character and choose to play a new one, your main account for OOC forum stays unchanged and retains continuity.
We hope to have requests for features, bug reports and gameplay discussion neatly separated from in-game events and group dynamics. Hopefully that will let any suggestion for games stand or fall by its own merit, without association to actions of player character in game.
The purpose of wiki
As indicated earlier the first content that is planned to go into wiki is the game’s manual. Now we do have it available but it is an external site, which breaks immersion when one needs to consult it.
There is also the question of who edits and maintains the wiki. At first this is going to be given to the development team, at least for the pages comprising official game manual. This is likely to change in future.
In summary
For now the wiki and forum software are not yet integrated into game. There are still some weeks left in December so we might still finish that.
It may have been a disputable decision to work on wiki and forums before having a strong player base. The counterpoint is that it is much easier to get it done early without needing to migrate posts after finding out forum or wiki does not fully meet our needs.
