Hello Worlds!

Worldbuilding for our collaborative interactive fiction

We decided at Hello Words last month that in order to give us something to work towards, we’d get going on a collaborative project. Our only initial decision was that it would have be science fiction, so this month it was time to sketch out a few more details.

We began with a general discussion of world-building and how it’s really not the mystifying special skill it’s sometimes presented as — it’s just another aspect of planning common to most fiction writing tasks. However, having a strong idea of setting can obviously be beneficial to writers, as it adds depth and believability to the fictional world, even if not all planned details are explicitly mentioned.

We used the Story Planner detailed world plan as a starting point, but found it was probably more in depth than was necessary for us at this early stage. We took a couple of points from it, though, using it to discuss some of the social and political concerns of our storyworlds, and points where the characters and settings of our stories might overlap.

We also hunted down some visual references for aspects of our worlds to help convey to one another the kind of aesthetic our world and its inventions would have. We finished up by considering our characters and how they would fit into the world we’d sketched out — how they’d feel about it’s various aspects, and what their salient features might tell us about their relationship to the world, and the world itself.

The brainstorming will now continue via a googledoc so we can all contribute and bounce ideas off one another. Next month we’ll be discussing what we’ve come up with and how it might form the basis of our games. If you’d like to join us you’d still be very welcome to — we chose sci-fi as a theme precisely because it can accomodate so many different ideas! Feel free to sign up here or just turn up. We’ll be in the NVA’s Clubroom on Thursday 10th August from 6:30pm as usual.