Making LoreHub Part 1: Timeline

I do worldbuilding many times without a suitable tool and in the end, decided to create my own.

Hello everyone! My name is Andrey, I am the creator of Leviathan: The Last Day of the Decade and now I am working on LoreHub.app. Here is my story so far.

How to store lore so that you can work with – Impossible!

When we were worldbuilding and do the writing for Leviathan, we tried different options for storing lore and script, but they were all compromises. We tried different wiki engines, tried google documents, and even all sorts of special tools for Hollywood scriptwriters, but everywhere there were some drawbacks and, in general, we accepted that all knowledge about the game would be just a set of documents spread out in folders with cross-references.

I tried a couple of times to write my own wiki, but every time I just copied what wiki is… I was stuck in this box.

The years passed. We released the second game, went broke, everyone from my team scattered and settled well in various jobs, and I dreamed of reviving Leviathan.

Started working on a comic strip and a novel. I tried to collect all the lore and somehow turn it into something understandable and clear timeline. But the biggest challenge, at that time, was that the lore didn't have time. It could not be decomposed into events that can be easily visualized and understand what place in time a comic strip takes or when will the next chapter of a novel happened in relation to events that already take place.

An excel came to the rescue, which turned into a timeline that you can see below:

Fragment of timeline in excel

This timeline in excel grow and grown with new lines. When they exceeded a hundred, it was already impossible to perceive, and I gave up.

Full-stack XP gain

As a result, I forgot for a while about Leviathan, game devs, and found myself a good job as a developer, got married, settled, and, most importantly, studied. Learned what can be learned outside of indie development. I learned to build systems, best development practices, and how to develop web services.

While I am learning I continue to be thinking about how I want to make that tool for the scriptwriters and worldbuilders around the world. The tool that I have tried to do many times and failed when I was lacked experience as a developer and don’t have an outside perspective.

But one day I decided that It is time. I feel prepared for a big leap forward. I call Mark (we were working together as worldbuilders and scriptwriters on Leviathan and now he is a scriptwriter for Encased) and discuss ideas that I have for such a tool with him. Once I even personally came to him and just showed everything as mocks and ideas. I really wanted to do something to make the life of writers and designers easier when working on the lore, world, and script of the game.

We have a couple of conversations and, in the end, I decided how I will approach this problem!

LoreHub - non stop evolution

I decided for myself that I want to do the development so that you can quickly create features, quickly change something, and most importantly, users should not suffer from this. It was important for me to sustain quality. I grab all the modern tools and concepts that I tried out, I set up CI/CD, introduced pragmatic TDD, and put all points into agility.

And revolution powered by evolution began...

One of the first version of a timeline.

The main focus was to have the ability to see how events compare to each other.

The next problem was, that event requires some kind of a connection to document.

Timeline now

And here is the version that currently (2020 Jan 6) in LoreHub. I think all world builders can benefit from it. We can have a deeper story, the context is richer, orchestrate events more accurately, make scenes more detailed and the history of the world is clearer.

Thanks for your attention! End of the first part.