Ok so I’m enjoying playing around with dio and The Search For Hod Rumble (see previous post for details) is well under way, whether it ever goes from private to public is another matter. My intention with this project is largely to play around with the features and get a good understanding of the platform whilst having fun at the expense of Rod Humble. However, even though I’m only at the start of my project, I have picked up some tips.
Plan your project
There are some really decent and very short tutorials on dio and they are well worth watching, this should help you with get started. However, whatever your project is, it’s worth planning and if you’re plan is interactive fiction, then you definitely need a plan. I advise using tools outside of dio to plan your project, a pen and paper will do along with some good old fashioned flow charts but planning works well, as I’ve discovered when I get into my project and realise I should have done things differently!
You’ll want a plot, then you’ll want a diagram of sorts, really, this is important, although you may have a photographic memory and not need plans and diagrams, for most of us, they are important. After a brief start you will soon realise you are losing track of your characters, rooms and paths if you don’t take notes. Do not be put off by this, taking notes is in the long term a good habit to get into anyway, as I discover the older I get and look back at my VBS and Powershell scripts at work or my LSL scripts in Second Life, where I thought I was too clever to need to comment on what I was doing! Bad move!
Temper Your Ambitions
It’s easy to get carried away, I know I did. My original plan was to have five characters with multiple storylines, I’ve now changed that to five characters with a storyline each, so there will be five versions of the story and maybe multiple endings. However at one stage I was planning three storylines for each of the five characters and then even within those storylines there would be multiple storylines. I planned a ten step quest, now start doing the maths on how many rooms I’d need for multiple stories within multiple stories, the maths gets scary real quick, so keep it simple, that way you can keep track.
Look At How Others Are Using dio
This is always a good step to take, take note of how others are using dio, even if it’s not in your area. How others use dio may give you inspiration on how you can use dio, it’s worth looking at what others are doing, even if their product is nothing like your product. I will give two examples here with Second Life links:
A Tribute to me aka the Fluffmeister by Flufee McFluff
Exploring Second Life by Inara Pey
Those two examples show different uses of dio, and also demonstrate well some of the features. I must admit that I’m quite distressed to read Flufee’s intro:
“I was a cuddly mesh superstar until they pulled the plug on my show couple days back. I am going to quote Whitesnake: “I do not know where I am going but I sure know where I have been!”
Surely they haven’t pulled the plug on Flufee???
Anyway, dio is fun, for me, others are dismissing it as an out of date MUD or MOO but I think it has potential and that’s the beauty of a lot of products, I’d still happily play ZX Spectrum games such as Manic Miner, Sabre Wulf and Sherlock the text adventure, games which the youth of today would turn their noses up in at disgust at how poor they look. However, us oldies are still around and can be marketed to and whereas I don’t want to condemn dio by suggesting it’s a place for oldies, it’s certainly a place where oldies can have fun!