The RPG EBook of the Future
To follow up on the Next Gen RPGs post I’d like to toss up a sample interface:
RPG E-Book Interface
This is probably a Flash application. You can resize, minimize or dismiss each pane in the interface above. The book screen is actually the second screen you’d get after opening up the game, after going to your library from the start screen (and seeing options to click through to campaign management, communities and play tools), though you’d be able to bypass that if you want.
I can visualize a lot of options, and a real danger in giving them near-equal standing that destroys the benefits of a minimalist interface. Funneling people to the most common functions without making it a total pain to go somewhere else is the challenge, and would require some experimentation to get right.
Let’s take it pane by pane:
Book Media Pane: Your book’s images appear here. They fade in when you hit an appropriate part of the text. Additional media plays here too. You can set images to appear in the text body instead, or link media to particular sections, so that clicking on them summons them to the media pane. If you want pure text, just dismiss the pane. Layout/design may configure the pane to automatically resize based on certain cues, to maintain its functionality while taking advantage of the aesthetics of traditional layout. You can also break out of the book completely to add media from your own library, that of the community, or any other mashable media object.
Book Text Pane: The game text goes here. You can select page by page layout, but the default is continuous scrolling, though not in the same sense as a big browser window. It may or may not have embedded media depending on the book and your preferences. The navigation pane makes it easily to find the content you want, but the text itself includes hyperlinks to other relevant sections, tutorials/FAQs, a as developer comments and community content (one touch brings up options and two goes to your default). You can also add your own comments in text regions to build in house rules.
Book Navigation Pane: The basic options here let you tab between text and gallery-style media navigation. In text navigation, the pane lists your current “page” (scrolling spot), chapter and heading, and lets you either navigate back and forth in each category, or pick from a pop up or drop down list. You can also perform a text-based search here. This sticks to the book by default but you can set it to search the entire game-as-service.
Tool and Community Tabs: Your tabs illustrate a major concept: Your book is never just your book, but one emphasis in the resource cloud. You really only need two tabs here because these can “rotate” through a list of options, including play tools like a dice roller, community forums and your campaign notes.
Interesting concept. What about being able to invite others at varying permission levels? So you can have, say, adventures and invite your players to view the document, but they can only see sections you’ve tagged as “player-viewable” or whatever? Once the adventure is completed, more of the document would be available to them — helping them to keep notes or whatever.
That’s not a bad idea, though I think there’s a point where too many features can bog down usability.
[...] implications for electronic tools in tabletop RPGs, a topic I’ve blogged about here and here. As I cover the tech beat for one of my freelancing clients none of this was too surprising, though [...]
Sounds a little like the Inform 7 IDE for writing Zork-style games.
The window has two panes, one on the left, one on the right. Each has a series of tabs allowing you to select the content you want there. One tab is the system/language documentation. Another tab is an interpreter that you can play the work-in-progress in. Another tab is an interactive index of all the objects in the game. Another tab, if I recall correctly, is a map of the environment you’ve created so far. And of course one tab is the text editor.
It’s free if you want to try it, and available for Mac, Windows, and Linux at inform7.com.
If you’re not familiar with Inform 7, it lets you write text adventures with a language that approximates English. To create a room called the kitchen, you’d write “The kitchen is a room”. To connect another room to it, you write “East of the kitchen is the library”. Click run and the interpreter tab will come up and you’ll have a playable, if boring, two room game.