Hi guys! 

This is a long post - tl;dr: We are working on map design, we want your thoughts, and we are making some code sketches of how it might work which you will soon be able to play with. xx

We’ve been working hard on the next step in our design - the persistent over-world which defines the context within which your stories will have meaning. It’s a complex design challenge with a lot of different factors at play.

For instance: The original build of The Written World, some five years old now, was mapped on two levels, by continent and by island/landmass.

Each island was a single screen, a tile based map with a land-mass drawn onto it. Players could add locations to islands, and locations were containers for characters and objects. It was a pretty robust system, but it also placed a constraint on the sorts of stories people could tell. It also failed to engage its audience - we found interest in the system bottomed out after a while. A lot of the thought and attention we have put into story building and story writing represent our attempts to learn from that, but we also think the map system may have been a culprit.

We sat down and listed the problems our map building had to solve:

• Our map must offer a sense of place and context to stories.
• Our map must be meaningful - iconic visuals are fine but our map is the territory it represents, and as such it must display enough meaning to be satisfactory in representing a world.
• Our map must allow for a profusion of different scales: stories take place over wildly different amounts of physical space. Some may progress over whole continents, while others might take place in a single room. Our map has to allow both of these stories to exist.
• Our map must allow for a profusion of different genres: we want people to be as comfortable writing a murder-mystery set in wartime Berlin as they are a fantasy epic, or a hard sci-fi, or a piece about a guy who lives in a village and falls in love. How can we provide all of these story types with a world to inhabit, without making that world meaningless?
• Our world map must meet up with our story-maps: the map of the entire world and the map of each individual story must be made of the same sort of stuff.
• Our map must have ludic meaning and consequence - our map building and story-writing experiences are intrinsically tied together. How can we make sure that maps which are representations of written stories have gameplay meaning, while still allowing people to write what they want, when they want? Gameplay is often about providing well-designed constraints - how can we make sure these constraints still invite creative and varied writing?

It’s a hefty set of challenges - which means our solutions are going to be fun to craft. We started looking for cases of other people trying to solve this map-is-the-territory-and-the-narrative problem. We checked out a lot of different data-visualisation techniques and a great number of actual maps, from the old to the new, but our first flash of inspiration came from checking out old video game maps at the fantastic vgmaps.com. Something struck us about the empty, uninhabited maps of old 16-bit era platform games. These were narratives, they read left to right like a story and they were visually a mixture of the iconic and the representative. They allowed for multiple scales and even for narrative spreads which end where they begin. We started to look at comic books, tapestries  and adventure games in a new light - here’s a format which users can re-skin easily, are familiar with, and which allows us to connect up building stories, writing stories and mapping stories. We began sketching designs.

We’re picturing something which hooks up with an overworld map - imagine something like Super Mario World on the snes - stories, like pathways, will cluster around entrance points on the overworld. You’ll be able to explore them like comics, visual narratives with their text attached, each reading from left to right with encounters and cast laid out in narrative sequence.

While we’re preparing to commit on a decision here, we’ve also been building prototypes. Little code sketches of how the system, or similar systems might work. One of those sketches has begun to turn into something coherent.

This offers us a glimpse of an alternative system. Here we map things top down, and make the map intrinsic to story-writing. It’s a two player game, with some board game mechanics at play, as well as story-writing. Each player has a character to control, and either player can control any of the antagonist characters on the map, which are loaded in based on what type of story is being played - for example a heroic epic might contain a monster, an ally, a traitor and a hero. Each action taken on the board takes a turn. Play is split up into narrative sections - ‘The Call’, ‘The Road’, ‘The Summit’. Players ‘win’ by completing the objectives set out by encounter cards - for example ‘A Home Destroyed’ might require players to escape their starting tile and be the first to occupy a safe tile, avoiding monsters and obstacles along the way.

Something like this has a much more regimented structure than anything we currently have planned for The Written World proper. We’ll show it to you when it’s a little more complete and ask you whether you would be interested in seeing us move more in this direction. I’d love to hear your opinions now!