A lot of development work and not a lot of reflection or documentation. I’ll take a moment here.
Grotto is gradually coalescing into the following views
- an index view, with a listing of all the rooms in the maze that players have visited, and the ability to see the histories of each room (events that happened there, character and npc deaths, acts of devotion to obelisks, but not what characters, npcs or objects are currently in the rooms). A listing of characters and their descriptions, but not where they currently are. This is what you see when you directly visit the urls of a room, of a character, or of the index page when you aren’t logged in.
- A text view, this is the simplest way to see a room when you are logged in and your character is in the maze. This is the base experience of exploring that we elaborate on.
- An iconic view of the room. This adds a focus area that allows play with a joystick. The text view and the iconic view could merge, both are in flux.
- Cenotaphs. This hasn’t been built yet. Cenotaphs are containers for 3d objects, images and writing. I’d like them to be a place for me to write hypertext. I’ve thought about embedded twine-like hypertext, or circling back to soft corruptor and using summary/details to write. I’d like it to be a sort of rich text that doesn’t present a huge chunk of text at once, it should be the simplest possible way of doing branching text that can all be viewed inline in a page of everything that has been added to that cenotaph. I imagine an a-frame diorama as a sort of starting image, and then inside or beneath it a path of text that can be navigated through. This is the bulk of the work- situating writing by associating it with a person, the time in which they lived. Think of two things and place them in the room with the marker left for this person. It’s a public space, people can walk through. Someone might see and read what’s been left. Connections could be made between cenotaphs or between rooms. Just more links.
