Dev Update 0

Hello and welcome to Development (Dev) Update 0. Dev Update will be a recurring series on the RPC publication that will hopefully occur with fair regularity as development efforts continue. I thought I’d use update 0 to discuss the overarching goals of RP Club, some of the features I want to include, and my ideal release schedule moving forward.

Goals

While all the goals for RP Club can be boiled down to “provide the best text-based RP experience online” that painfully oversimplifies some of the finer details that I’d like to outline. So let’s go over the individual goals of the platform:

1. Make it easy to use for everyone regardless of how they’re accessing the site. This means making it accessible on mobile just as much as it is on desktop. Also, make it accessible to users with vision impairments as well.
2. Make it instinctual. By that I mean, a lot goes into roleplaying and when you’re in the depths of your mind working on a post the last thing you need to do is remember to do some awkward work around just for your post to show up the way you want it. So I want to make the user experience (UX) on the site feel as natural as possible so the last thing you’re focused on is how the site works and you can focus more on telling your stories.
3. Provide as many options as people have come to expect from their rp experiences on other sites. This goes somewhat in tandem with #2 above, but the goal is to not take away or diminish your ability to rp by choosing RPC over other sites you currently use. Rather I’m looking at these sites (tumblr, twitter, facebook, livejournal, chat-based systems, etc.) to find the best features and figuring out how to implement them in a natural way on RPC.
4. Build a community. While there will undoubtedly be segments and sub-segments that form naturally or already exist that come onto RPC I do want to have a strong sense of community here. I feel a strong community will only help us moving into the future.
5. Add plenty of tools for players to use whether they wind up playing on RPC or not. Things like a rp glossary, help articles that cover how to play, a face claim directory (already under construction), and other tools like that to make rpers’ lives easier. This also goes back to #2 and #3 a bit by simply wanting to make players’ lives simpler so they can focus on storytelling more.

As I mentioned, sure these could be boiled down into “make good rp place” but hopefully me spelling them out will give you more of an idea on the intent of RP Club. Now onto some of the features.

Features

While I do have a rather lengthy laundry list of features I’d like to touch on a few of them since they seem high up on the list for some people and deserve to be called out.

1. Unlimited Characters — simply put if you can make the character you can play it. There’s no limit on the number, it’s just whatever you feel you can play at the time. There are going to be plenty of tools to help manage all of them such as…
2. Character Switcher — this is something I know players on a lot of sites are aching for and yes, you’ll get it on RPC. An easy-swap feature is going to be available from the get go on RPC whenever we launch the beta. It’s easy to do and, honestly, it’s kind of alarming not many folks have done it yet.
3. Rooms — rooms will function a lot like chats, or when you join a set rp on tumblr. Basically, rooms are universes all to themselves owned by whoever created them, and managed by the creators plus whoever they give elevated rights (i.e. “Staff” of that room). They have many of the same features as Indie rp’s plus a little more for user management.
4. Indies — independent or freelance rpers are a unique group of players with a unique set of requirements. For a while I hadn’t even considered making a space for them until I saw the need to separate them out. Indie characters will have most of the same features as Rooms but minus a few things to help manage users (since there’s only one person running an indie character). The Indies will also have a directory all to their own with plenty of search and discovery options to find and follow rp.

There are a whole lot more features that I linked to at the beginning of this section. If you’d like to peruse through them or even suggest new ones feel free to head over to the list and leave a comment.

Release Schedule

Finally, the release schedule talk. Now I’ve been working off and on RP Club for a few years and I’ve made some progress here and there. I’ve even moved servers once or twice during that time. I’d love to go ahead and give dates but I’ve been witness to just how much life can swing those plans so I’m going to avoid that right now.

Instead what I’m going to do is say that ideally I’ll launch the site as a beta sometime this year. The beta should have all the basic features I put on the laundry list to ensure there would be mostly bug fixing during the beta as opposed to adding too many whole new features. Once I feel we’ve gone through sufficient testing for the beta we’ll move to a full release, but not before I feel we’re ready. Here’s to a hopefully fruitful 2018 dev cycle.