design questions as I think of them
Added by Woozle Hypertwin over 9 years ago
Universes¶
While rereading the design docs as I moved them over to HTYP (I battled with myself for a bit, but decided that MediaWiki's feature set really makes it more suitable for this kind of thing than the Redmine wiki), it occurred to me to wonder:
Might authors want to create more than one Story set in the same universe? If so, what elements can we assume each same-universe Story would have in common, and/or which should be unique within each Story regardless of whether they're in the same universe? Would it make things much easier for the author to be able to share elements among Stories, or am I making unnecessary coding work by considering this possibility?
I'm assuming that the same Author should be able to create multiple stories, connected or unconnected with each other (same or different universes).
Plan A: One way to not have to deal with this right now would be to allow Authors to copy elements from one Story to another in a sort of batch mode (list all elements in current Story, select with checkboxes or whatever, select destination Story, press [Copy] button). If it turns out to be important to keep things in sync, we could have "live links" so that updating an element in one Story updates it in all the others.
So this is basically a "Does that make sense to you?" and/or "Do you have any particular thoughts about it one way or the other (which might throw Plan A into doubt)?"
Replies (1)
RE: design questions as I think of them - Added by Michael German over 9 years ago
Your copy-elements idea sounds like it would be the best way to handle this, as a first impression on the issue. I wonder if there's a way we could allow them to create a kind of "story template" that will automatically fill in/create the assets they want to be shared among their multiple stories.
Along these lines, I wonder if we could make it possible for players to also use the same character in different same-universe stories? Like, if story B imports all of the character qualities from story A, if story B can't re-create the player's story A character and let them use it there. Could make things difficult to balance, from a game design perspective, but might be something to think about.