OngoingWorlds blog

News & articles about play-by-post games, for roleplayers & writers

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The story of New Worlds Project: #8 – Rethinking roleplaying

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By Kim Smouter, Co-Founder of New Worlds Project. See part 1 of the story of New Worlds Project here.

One of the things which we’re experimenting within New Worlds Project is a concept we’re calling 360-degree creativity, and I see it as a real experiment that I can only hope will prove successful once we get underway. Read More

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The story of New Worlds Project: #5 – Designing the ultimate website for your ultimate game…

New worlds website timeline

By Kim Smouter, Co-Founder of New Worlds Project. See part 1 of the story of New Worlds Project here.

The website is the engine room of any decent play-by-post role-playing community, and as a result, it deserves as much attention as you give to the setting and game design process. In this chapter, I intend to cover in greater detail how the past, current, and future websites of New Worlds Project were designed and brought to life, in the hopes of inspiring greater deployment of efforts within our community. Read More

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The story of New Worlds Project: #4 – Keeping the excitement going

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By Kim Smouter, Co-Founder of New Worlds Project. See part 1 of the story of New Worlds Project here.

It might be worthwhile having a refresh. Chapter 1 introduced this series as a story of the up and down and hopefully up again that New Worlds Project has experienced in its 10 year history. This chapter covers what we did to keep it going and can perhaps serve as a checklist for others… Read More

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The story of New Worlds Project: #3 – Launching the saga

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Written by Kim Smouter, Co-Founder of New Worlds Project. Read all articles about New Worlds Project

Getting the setting right was just one of the many challenges facing our launch. We had to get the word out that we had created this setting. We wanted intrepid writers to come join us to test whether it could serve as a decent platform for collaborative writing and role-playing. We’d been working a few years towards achieving this, whilst keeping our responsibilities at Star Trek: Independence where both of us were quite key players. Read More

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The story of New Worlds Project: #2 – Crafting an Original Setting

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Written by Kim Smouter, Co-Founder of New Worlds Project. See part 1 of the story of New Worlds Project here.

What we did in 2003

When New Worlds Project was launched in 2003, Alex and I were both excited, and relieved to have passed the development stage of the initiative. Developing an original setting is no small feat but it is a deeply rewarding experience which became a central unique selling point of the initiative in its heydays. What I want to do in this chapter is to really go through the ingredients and approaches that really made this work at the time to enable you to have a recipe that could be followed by game-masters looking to launch an original concept. Read More

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The story of New Worlds Project: #1 – 2001, a Space Odyssey

New worlds project

Written by Kim Smouter, Co-Founder of New Worlds Project.

From successful launch, to project failure, to reboot – my journey as a co-founder

In 2001, the world was a very different place, the idea that a mixed-race man would become the next President of the United States was a dream we all thought would only become a reality in a century, and I was still years away from graduating from school. The term ‘social media’ to represent weirdly named sites like Facebook or Twitter did not exist in the English language. Read More