Tags
Related Posts
Share This
Dungeon World – Design In Public
Dungeon World has been a blast to design so far, so we’re making the design even more open. I’m a software guy by trade, so we’re taking some ideas from open source development and applying them to Dungeon World.
From now on, the raw XML files that get synced into layout are going to be publicly available between major releases.
A pretty typical software development setup is to have a version control system where all the code sits which gets compiled into release versions according to some schedule. Dungeon World will now be kind of the same, with the raw text (in XML to map it to layout) sitting in a subversion repository and PDFs being created as ‘releases.’
Most software projects have some kind of automated builder that rebuilds the product at set intervals. An equivalent for Dungeon World isn’t really in the works, layout will still require some manual touches and will happen only when Adam and I decide it’s time for a new version.
I Just Want To Play DW, What Does This Mean For Me?
If your main interest in DW is just playing the game with the latest finished version, nothing really changes that you’ll notice. Behind the scenes things will be smoother to allow Adam and I to turn out new versions more efficiently, but that’s it. Enjoy the PDFs, which will come out whenever we think they need to (when enough changes have accumulated, we have something new that needs to be shown off, or there’s a con/event coming up).
I Want To See How DW Develops, What Does This Mean For Me?
If you’re interested in watching the design of Dungeon World, you can get the latest version of the basic text at all times here: http://svn.latorra.org/dungeonworld/. You can also browse the change history from the web using a Trac site I’ve setup here: http://www.latorra.org/dungeon-world-svn/browser. The Trac site lets you see exactly how a file has changed from version to version, what’s changed recently, and all kinds of other great stuff.
I Want To Provide Some Feedback And Ideas, What Does This Mean For Me?
If you want to really get involved in the design process, you can checkout the files using Subversion, the repository is http://svn.latorra.org/dungeonworld/. If there’s a change you’d really like to see, you can even give us a diff patch file and we’ll see about adding it in.
Why?
Why make Dungeon World available like this?
Well, Adam and I are in different countries, so we needed a way to collaborate. There are lots of other people who have good ideas, so why not let them collaborate too?
I needed to stop being a bad person who writes directly into layout, but I also needed a system that made multiple updates easy. Dungeon World is taking kind of an incremental development strategy, so I want to be able to make an incremental release as easily as possible, and this XML to InDesign mapping seems like the best way.
This whole automated mapping opens up the possibility of multiple layouts for DW content. The current layout is pretty 4E influenced, but with the XML mapping there could easily be a Red Box styled version.
It’s also a model I understand. Software gets developed like this and it seems to work. Maybe it can work for a tabletop game text too.
In the end, it’s just a way to share more of the design process. It’s a way of breaking down some of those weird designer/player identity issues that happen with mainstream game designs. It’s a way of making contributing ideas a clearer process. It’s an experiment, to see if DW can bring something new to the design process, not just to the table.
So go, check out what we’re doing, give us feedback and ideas and all the stuff you would anyway. This is just a way to make that process easier.
Dude, this is really inspirational. We’ve talked and talked about version control but seeing you take it to the next level is going to be really fun to watch.
Thanks, Jason. Hopefully it turns out to be a worthwhile model, but even if it doesn’t it’s at least an interesting experiment.
Cool stuff Sage.
I very much like this open model of design – it’s great for OSS, and I’m right keen to see how it works for game design.
On the more technical side of this initiative, it’d be great if the Dungeon World hack content was wholly separated from the presentation of that content.
Forex, there’s a lot of ‘align=”left”‘ and ‘colwidths’ in the current XML. Removing that and using basic XML building blocks of your own design to capture the Dungeon World elements would be a good thing.
That way folks who wanted to build off of the initial work you have done here – for their own hacks of AW, or to provide different representations of that content beyind the PDF that you are providing initially – would have an easier time.
On that note, what is the license associated with this content? Can I just take it and “fork” it in the interest of providing a version with that clean separation? How does one go about providing a different stylesheet for the production of DW in other formats (HTML, eText, etc.)? Is this meta-stuff an interesting property of this initiative?
Shucks, wall of text! I’ll go now, cheers
Pete
Hey Pete, thanks for the comment.
Ideally it would be wholly separated, but I haven’t been able to get that to work while still making the layout work without a lot of manual intervention. It’s an ongoing process, but improving it (both by making the text less bound to the layout and making the layout more automated) is definitely a goal.
Licensing is another interesting issue. Vincent’s license on the original text is kind of vague, basically “do what you want as long as you don’t copy text directly, and even that might be okay if you ask.” I need to ask vincent directly what that means for what licenses we can apply. I’ve had at least a couple of people ask about it, so it needs to be made clear somehow. My current leaning is Creative Commons, just so I don’t have to mess with finding a different license.
Other style sheets should be possible, especially with a little hacking. I can easily imagine automated python scripts to convert the xml to LaTex or html (with hand crafted css), and I imagine there are probably even better ways.
Anyway, thanks for your wall of text, I’ve attempted to reply with my own wall of text.
Hi Sage
I had a quick hacking session with your Dungeon World source, attempting to structure it into markup that I could then format at will.
I chose to use ReStructuredText as the target output format, because that is easy to read as-is and also easy to turn into HTML or PDF.
Here’s an example of the kind of changes to the markup I made: http://www.box.net/shared/rx9d9zjjz2
The Perl script that consumes that uses XML::LibXML and Text::Template to produce the ReStructuredText source: I haven’t written Perl in ~10 years, so it was kinda fun getting back into that.
In any case, I’ll finish hacking up the rest of the source XML and the ReStructuredText source (and HTML/PDF versions) soonish.
Cheers
Pete