OngoingWorlds blog

News & articles about play-by-post games, for roleplayers & writers

Feb
23

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A tragedy occurs in Ongoing Worlds!

Category: Website Improvements Tags: , 11 Comments

The hindenburg

DISASTER STRIKES!!!

Disaster strikes in Ongoing Worlds’ first play-by-post to be created. The game, which was created just a few days ago has had three posts so far, two by the creator; Mike, and one by me, testing out my new character which I created for the game.

Mike spent an hour and a half writing a story post which he claims was awesome. It was a work of literary genius. But unfortunately he spent all that time writing this amazing post in the browser, typing away inside the textfield on the “post” page of his game. When he was finally finished with this piece of artwork, he reached for the submit button… and pressed it.

That was where things went wrong. He’d expected the next page he saw was to say “Your post has been submitted successfully”, but unfortunately what was actually shown was a login prompt saying “You need to be logged in to access this page”.

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Feb
22

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The first game is created

Category: Play-by-post discussion, Website Improvements Tags: , , 3 Comments

Wizards Inc, office building

The office building for "Wizards Inc"

The Ongoing Worlds website gets it’s first (proper) play-by-post game! Mike, (who I know from the Blue Dwarf game I run) has setup a game called “Wizards Inc” about a magical society set in the modern world. The game is silly, which suits Mike’s sense of humour, and I’ve already joined and submitted a character.

I’ll let you know about how the game goes. If you’d like to join or want more details about the game please have a look here:

http://www.ongoingworlds.com/alpha/games/88

Obviously this isn’t the first time games have been created on the website, I’ve created many games to test the functionality of the site, and also I’ve tasked my friends with creating games just to make sure that the interface I’ve created is usable to people not just myself. But this is the first time a game has been created with the intention of playing seriously.

Feb
11

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OngoingWorlds website goes into alpha

Category: Website Improvements Leave a Comment

I’ve been working very hard lately on the OngoingWorlds website, and have relised I need quite a lot of help testing the damed thing! I’m too close to it now that I can’t see clearly (a bit like snow-blindness).

Screenshot of the Ongoing Worlds homepage

Screenshot of the Ongoing Worlds homepage (taken 11th Feb 2010)

I’ve shown it to some of the guys at work, and had some great feedback. Most important was a very serious security flaw which I’d not noticed. Tim created a test game (based on Babylon 5) and a character called Londo Mollari, but started inserting HTML into some of the character fields – like the <marquee> tag. Anyone who knows about the <marquee> tag is that it’s such bad taste that it should never appear on a website ever. It makes the worde move across the page and reminds me of websites from the 1990’s which were full of distracting nonsesne like that.

However, Tim was able to insert the code which creates a <marquee> tag into a character field, and then when you save and view the character, it displays his name scrolling across the page. This is embarassing for now, but could lead to some dangerous problems later if users realise they can insert HTML into my site without it being stripped out. I’ve had a site get hacked before by a Turkish hacker group  just by inserting HTML and replacing my homepage for a large image of their own.

I have no idea why people do this. But if they can, they will.

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Feb
1

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Why I'm not going to implement “personal messages”

Category: Website Improvements Tags: , Leave a Comment

For this article, I recorded an additional audio clip:

On many forums and websites, you can send a personal messages to other members. This saves a message in the website’s database ready for the other user to see when they next login. The user might not login straight away, and so the personal message could sit there for weeks and weeks until the user logs in to see the message. That is why they are normally sent out an email straight away, alerting the user and letting them know that they have to login to the website to see their personal message.

Facebook does this, when a member receives a personal message, they are immediately emailed with the content of the message. So the user checks their email, and sees the content of the personal message within their email. Then they have to login to the website to reply to the message.

Email Icon

What's wrong with email?

This process seems all a bit too cumbersome for me, all it seems like is that websites are duplicating the functionality of email, but still using email to alert people to the email!

I therefore think that adding a way to send and receive personal messages through the OngoingWorlds site is necessary. What I’ll do instead is allow users to send an email from the site which will be sent directly to the user’s email address. The user sending the message will see a form within the website, the same as if they were sending a personal message – but it would submit the email directly to the respondent’s email address.

Please let me know what you think about not adding in functionality for “Personal Messages”. Is it a feature that you wouldn’t miss? Or do you think I’m wrong/stupid to leave it out? Please comment below!

Jan
24

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Help needed to test the OngoingWorlds website

Category: Website Improvements Tags: , , , 2 Comments

Last week I launched the very first version of my website onto the internet. It’s definitely not ready to go public, and is currently in a hidden location on my server so that people don’t visit the site and think it’s a live site. I have put it live really just to test that the main site functionality works, and also to get some friends to test the site for anything that is broken which I might not have thought to check.

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Jan
10

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New Design

Category: Website Improvements Tags: , , Leave a Comment

I’ve been working this weekend on a design for the OngoingWorlds website. I’m not a designer so this process was very difficult for me. I knew quite specifically what I wanted from the design, but implementing it in graphical form is difficult! I wanted a design which is:

  • Simple
  • Easy Navigation
  • Reasonably Neutral (to suit members of all different tastes)
  • Fun, but not childish

I had a look around at some cool sites for inspiration, and found it at http://cssremix.com/ which lists some really nice sites that have a really clear simple style. I found that I liked the textured grainy background which was on a few sites, and the beige neutral colours were perfect for what I wanted. I took a lot of influence from one site in particular, and tried to copy from it without totally ripping it off!

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Jan
3

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PBEM or Play-by-post

Category: Play-by-post discussion, Website Improvements 5 Comments

I’ve been questioning for a while what to call the games that people will run on the OngoingWorlds site, and have been disputing between calling them PBEM games, or play-by-post games.

I’ve recorded a short audio comment for this article:

What are people searching for?

As a website owner, I have to think about what people are typing into a search engine to try and find my site. So they would type in “PBEM” or “play-by-post”, often they would be more specific and want to find a “Startrek PBEM” or a “fantasy play-by-post”. It’s important that I get the wording correct on the OngoingWorlds website, so that it appears in the correct search results.

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Dec
9

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Character tagging in posts on OngoingWorlds

Category: Website Improvements Tags: , , 3 Comments

OngoingWorlds is currently on my development server, awaiting to go live. There are a few features however which I haven’t yet implemented. These features are the cream of the cake however, and might not be added until after the site goes live. It’s taking long enough to get a basic version working as it is!

A knight on a horse

Sir Tony might be tagged in this post

Currently, when a user submits a post to OngoingWorlds it will create a post which will go into a thread of posts. All posts will be archived in a long list by date. Easy and simple.

Other members will be able to see that post, and read its contents. For example the post is about a character called Sir Tony who is riding on a horse to a castle. The post has been written with amazing love and care, the spelling is perfect and the grammar is amazing. But it’s still a page of plain text, and I want to jazz it up a bit with an image. Asking a player to submit an image every time they post is a bit unreasonable, as finding an appropriate image would take a long time, and might actually be impossible unless the user draws the image themselves, scans it and uploads it. Far too much work, but it’s not too much work to put an image of the character on the post.

In OngoingWorlds you’ll be able to “tag” a post just like you can tag users in a photo on Facebook. So in our example, the player tags their character Sir Tony in the post and his smiley face is shown to any other players who are reading that post.

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Dec
5

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Ordering the games on the games page

Category: Website Improvements Tags: , , 2 Comments

So I’ve been working today on the “Games” page. This will be a page accessible to all users that lists all of the games on the site so far. This can be where users can browse, to see if a game interests them.

I’m displaying the game title, as well as a thumbnail of the profile image you can upload for the game. Other useful information I thought people would want to know initially is how many members the game has, and how many characters it has.
I also think what is most important is that a user can tell how long it has been since the last post, which is why I have included a link to the two most recent posts, and specified the dates they were posted. This way, a user will not try and subscribe to a game which hasn’t had a post in five years.

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Oct
18

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Category: Website Improvements Tags: , Leave a Comment

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