The Story Thus Far

I wrote "The Fifth World Manifesto" almost a year and a half ago, and the first public version of the game appeared at thefifthworld.com almost a year ago, on 21 December 2006. Mick Bradley at the Harping Monkey really helped get the word out about it when he started a thread there, from whence it got some mentions on Gamer: The Podcasting, and even set off a little exchange between myself and Anim5 on International Detective Dragons from Outer Space. Wii reviewed v. 0.2 for RPG.net, and I have to admit, I can't really argue with his summation, and that has a good deal to do with why nearly a year has gone by now with so little news about the Fifth World.

After an initial scramble to try to get our ideas down on paper and out there to begin the wheels of open source innovation a-turning, we realized that that approach wouldn't really work. Who wants to put that effort into a game that doesn't really exist yet? Wii's review brought that point home: putting out an incomplete game won't get you an open source crowd working on it, it will just spoil the reception when you really do have a working game. Everyone will just associate it with the perceptions the incomplete, embryonic form inspired. So we took the work back behind the scenes. There, work has progressed slowly and methodically.

Even so, the open source ideal lies so close to the heart of the Fifth World, that keeping it secret just seems wrong. So instead, today I thought, why not start a design diary? I don't need to put an unfinished game out there in the wild, but by letting people know how it's going and the ideas I have in my head at the moment, we can still involve you in this process.

Hence, this design diary. Expect a slew of postings soon to bring everybody up to speed with some of those ideas we've worked out in secret over the past year.