WWWest-Online Development Blog

Wow, it’s a been a while since my last post. During that time we’ve made a lot of progress with our knowledge base, and now I’m gonna tell you a bit more about it. So, as the song goes, let’s start at the very beginning.

WWWest-Online is set in the American Old West, more commonly known as “The Wild West”, so the first thing we had to do when we started work on our knowledge base was to delimit it to that era. The Wild West, we soon found out, was a bit tricky to box in, since its start and end are a bit hazy. What I did find, however, was that as a general rule, the Wild West era is considered to have spanned most the second half of the 19th century. Though several years before and after that time are still considered to be “Wild West”, that was how we decided to delimit it, and that’s why we decided on 1845-1895: we took those years and added a few before and after them, for some surrounding backstory.

Up until now we spent about a year building a very comprehensive historical knowledge base that includes a timeline with events that happened in those years all over the world, biographies of people who lived in the Old West, wars, maps and a lot of other things. Our work is far from being complete but we’ve made some serious progress, allowing us to create the basis for an Old West game experience based on real history.

As I said, our knowledge base is historical, and all the information is checked and verified before its goes into it. But making this knowledge base was more than that. We wanted to avoid the trope of namedropping, and wanted to provide some actual historic information. For example, some of the information that I collected was about people who lived in the Old West. Now, when you think of the Wild West, several names come to mind immediately. I mean, who hasn’t heard of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Billy the Kid or Wild Bill Hicock? But those few famous folks weren’t the only interesting people around, were they? While I’ll grant that Joe the farmer and Eugene the ore miner weren’t necessarily the most interesting of people to look into, there were many other interesting individuals in the West, even if they weren’t as famous as those named above.

In future posts I’ll probably share some of the info I’ve managed to dig up, and even give a little background about the Old West (since to many it just means Western movies and cowboys ), but for starters, this will probably do.

As always, if there is any information you think we could use, or something about which you would like to know, feel free to comment.

Stego