Nov
30
Ok yeah this might be quite a lot! The screenshot above was taken by Leon from his game Spellbound, which has quite a few characters! Read More
Jun
23
Here’s to another year!
Today, June 22nd, 2014. Marks one year for me as an Ongoing Worlds member. The reason I’m making this is to thank the members of Ongoing Worlds and the countless number of the other big faces in role playing. Read More
Jul
22
Here’s an update that was originally asked for by Phantasmagoria, who a while ago asked in our Facebook group for a better ways to select characters mentioned in a post. The problem was, that games with too many characters got too difficult to select them from a drop-down box. Read More
Jun
11
It’s been possible to tag characters in your posts for a while now (see the article where this was introduced here), which gives readers a quick and easy way to view the character profile for a character mentioned in a post. Sometimes this isn’t quick enough and readers might only need a quick recap, rather than to read a character’s full biography and history. That’s why we’ve introduced the character fly-out summary.
Hover over a character tagged in a post and you’ll see a summary bio fly out from the side. This will show the character’s gender, age and character group, and a character summary (if it has one). Read More
Jul
17
I want to let you know about a new update to the OngoingWorlds website that I’m quite excited about! Now, when you write your post, you can select which characters are in the post. This will show the characters names and thumbnail photos down the right-hand side of the page when you’re reading the post.
I’ve been talking about this feature for months on Twitter and to any interested people who I’ve talked to directly. I even did a blog post back in December, about why this feature is so cool. It’s part of what I want the site to be about, making it easier to see information at a glance. Being able to see a quick snapshot of the characters involved, you’ll quicker be able to see what the post is about.
Jul
12
Sometimes it's time to put your characters down and speak as yourself
OOC is an acronym for “out of character”. It is usually used in a PBP or PBEM game to indicate that the following text is written by the author, and not intended as speech from the point of view of the writer’s character.
If you see this in a post, it usually means that the following paragraph has been written by the member as something intended to communicate to other members, like an instruction or comment. The member is making it clear that this is something they are saying, and not the character they are writing about.
Use an OOC comment at the start of your post, or at the end to either comment on the post, or at the end to give a suggestion or instruction about what the reader should do next.
Jun
7
Children playing tag
There might be many different words for what I’m writing this article about, but I’ve always known it as “tagging”. The word presumably comes from the game you play as a kid called “tag” where one person has to chase everyone else, and “tags” them (or we also used to say “tig”). The other person would then be “it” and responsible for catching and tagging someone else. The person who was “it” was the sole person who could move the game on.
So it’s this thinking why we use the word “tag” on the end of our posts, to signify that it’s another person’s turn to continue the game.
Dec
9
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!
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.
