This project is an independent study I am working on in the Spring 2009. In this project, I draw on my experiences with the Invasion Cute project wiki and my experience with MediaWiki from my time as an administrator on GuildWiki (the unofficial wiki for the MMO Guild Wars).
I intend to create a collection of tools and a system of organization that will make the MediaWiki framework more ideal for doing design documents for games.
This system will hopefully include:
- Templates to appear on pages
- Bots to make moving groups of pages and changing section numbers automated
- Extensions to the MediaWiki interface that will help with version tracking and flagging articles for attention
- A way of managing users so that messages and information can be shared among groups
- A standard set of categories, namespaces and CSS stuff that will be help make the design doc easier to work with
- System for making the wiki pages correspond to the physical design doc
Creating a design doc is all about content creation. This project is aimed to improve the productivity of design doc creation and will draw on the needs of content creators from artists to programmers to designs.
Not only will this study be a benefit to content creators, but an understanding of the needs of content creators and the design process is integral to building a tool for it.
This project was largely inspired by my own frustration in using a project wiki for Game World Design (Invasion Cute). I could see many ways that it was making the collaboration of the design easier but working it I also became aware of many ways in which it was lacking. Drawing on the knowledge I gained from that work will be a great help in this study.
Close attention will be paid to the design process, elements of design documents, collaboration and planning a design team, and the needs of people who will be using this system.
- Wikis are easy to edit
- Wikis can be accessed from anywhere
- Wikis automatically track all updates
- Wikis are great with organizing because of the categories and name spaces
- Wiki templates and inclusions are great for the formulaic nature of design docs and their propensity for repeating information throughout them for different purposes
- Wikis can simultaneously keep data organized in multiple ways by using inclusions to contain the same data for different people without worrying about data being changed one place but not another
- Wikis are to design and documentation development what svn and cvs are to software development: a solution to concurrent editing and version tracking.
- Incredibly difficult to move entire sections and keep things organized for use outside of the wiki.
- No method of tracking major changes for a design history
- Could benefit from a simpler way for designers to flag articles with various tags for people’s attention as well as a way to make sure such flags were instantly noticeable by the people who need to see them
- The conversion between a printable format for external presentation versus the convenience of the online format of the internal presentation can be cumbersome, time-consuming, and cancel out many of the benefits gained by using a wiki in the first place
- MediaWiki is the software package used by Wikipedia
- It is open-source
- It supports most of the desired features
- It’s relatively easy to add extensions to
- It’s familiar
- A place to host a wiki to test on
- A wiki populated with the type of data I expect to be working with.
- XML – content for wikis is stored in XML.
- Javascript – can be used to tie tools into the mediawiki interface
- PHP – extensions for mediawiki are written in PHP
- Wikitext – front end work with templates and such is done in Wikitext.
- Java – bots would be written in java to handle automated tasks
- Existing extensions for MediaWiki
In addition to working to make MediaWiki useful for the creation of the design document, I hope to make it more useful for intenal project management on the whole. Linking it into asset databases, project management, brainstorming sessions, game manual creation, and all parts of the design process that would benefit from the wiki's collaborative design will also be part of the research.