I really like writing. I always have to clarify that this is a genuine statement, because if I say this without clarifying it's assumed I'm being sarcastic. That I, like every other writer I've spoken to, absolutely hates this as a pursuit, despite never feeling this way. That I am, as I always have felt, completely detached from any mainstream writers' circles who immediately have to declare that writing is the worst thing a human could subject themselves to, but we have to do this, don't we? And everytime I answer, no, what the fuck are you talking about, I write because it's one of the most entertaining things I can do with my time. 

My "beginner's enthusiasm" hasn't waned the more I've started to mature into writing as an art, and if anything it's only gotten stronger. Every writer I've seen laments that writing a novel is one of the hardest things you can do. To me, the act of writing a novel sounds like the simplest thing in the world. And this isn't a matter of barking without any bite, because I have written novels, and they were easier than pissing. The hard part of writing a novel isn't writing a novel, the hard part is a simple matter of not being a nepo baby nor having a small marketing budget of 2 million USD.

Where was I?

I put out a "game" for the new LITHOBREAKERS jam, which was The Shaman, the Outsider, and the Diet of Worms. I did all the words, and my friend Reyn did the 3D modelling for the book and the wiki design. This started out as a postmortem for it, and then began to sprawl out into a longer treatise on worldbuilding and how I feel it in itself is a woefully underused narrative device. The two are intrinsically intertwined, so instead of trying to split the two into separate essays, here they are as one.

I'm expecting you to have messed with, or at least be aware of Diet of Worms. If you're not, go take a peek. It's something very different to the stuff I've put out before, which was part of the desire to put out something like this under an LBK jam in the first place, so I was keeping a keen eye on what the response would be like. First of all, let's get the biggest question out of the way:

hey. hey what the fuck

I was expecting some level of "what the fuck is wrong with you (positive)" in response to this, so getting that made me smile. The extent of that I didn't expect. I had to sit there pretending to freak out over this with everyone else, while also desperately trying to suppress the urge to go HEY GUYS THIS WAS ME DID YOU LIKE IT WHAT DID YOU THINK. The anonymous release cycle is both a blessing and curse. I even managed, while speculating over who made what in someone's DMs, to lie through my teeth and throw them off completely.

That said, some of you, of which I know are reading this right now, immediately clocked this was me. And I couldn't act all coy about it because there were about four tells that made it immediately obvious it was mine, and one person quoted a phrase that I deliberately hid in there for someone to catch. If you can believe it, putting things that are intended to be found in a work means that they will be found. Who knew?

And then my "what the fuck" in response to the people actually messing with it, was seeing pictures of the pdf loaded up on e-readers. Like, that's perfectly logical when you think about it for more than two seconds, but seeing a picture of an e-ink screen with DIET OF WORMS plastered on the front with the wiki in the background made something in my brain short-circuit. What do you mean, thing I typeset and designed like a novel is being treated like a novel? What do you mean real actual people are looking at this? What? Huh? What?

Alright that's been a lot of talking around nothing so let's get to the useful question:

What, Actually, is this?

Of everything, Diet of Worms is a trial run. This is a world I've been poking at for some time, and I've wanted to put out something related to it to see if anyone gives a shit. By that measure, it succeeded more than I could have hoped.

This world has stuck with me for just over 5 years at this point. It came about in my last year of university to support a bullet hell Touhou-ripoff I wanted to make, started to spiral off into its own thing, and then later became the main subject of my dissertation. Said dissertation was literally just an excuse to build this world out with some blithe thing about "audience reception" as the research topic. The dissertation was nothing. I'm shocked I got a high 90 on it, looking back.

I then have to take a step back, and actually ask what led me here in the first place. At some point in 2017, I landed on the worldbuilding subreddit. What... exactly led me to it I'm not sure. All I know is that once I was there, I became enraptured with worldbuilding as a hobby and art, followed guide after guide and planned and built all sorts of worlds hinging on one event or idea I wanted to play with. They all led nowhere, obviously, because the scale that these worlds were made at were monstrous; building entire planets of culture to serve a story that takes place in one city state.

So, with my bullet hell needing an outside world for people to come from (Touhou-ripoff being more accurate than you might expect), I needed to build a world that was just that, and now I had a motivation to see this method to the end, becoming very attached to the characters I'd made. My dissertation, going back to that excuse of the audience, was to present a world in two ways. One as a worldbuilding piece, and the other as a "traditional" narrative, and seeing which one people connected with, or something; it was complete toss. The first part was a collection of in-universe documents: atlases, language textbooks, scraps from history books, that sort of thing. The other would be a linear story, shown as a diary of someone who's just moved to the country, following their adventures for a year.

And it was... bad. Part of me thinks "bad" is a bit harsh, because some of the ideas in there were cool, but it was objectively quite bad. You see, this world came about as I was just properly coming to terms with the fact that I was a man. That was also compounded with realising that capitalism was bad, but also not really understanding the alternatives, and how we'd even get to those theoretical alternatives scared me. As you'd expect, any art I made during that time found itself in a weird limbo of yearning for something different, but also desiring a comfort of Everything Is Okay Because It's Okay. I remember wanting to make some kind of statements, but they were never allowed to flourish out to their full potential because of that. One I remember quite clearly, was Ousenta having a strong distinction and emphasis on binary gender, one that was found in all stratas of society, religion, and even their own language. Then they did a sudden 180 about twenty years ago and trans and nonbinary people are fine now and nobody talks about this shift, because wouldn't that be nice? It has its merit for being a crystallisation of myself in that moment, at least.

Unfortunately, I nuked the whole thing off my harddrive two years later after realising the foundational flaws of the thing, and really no way to fix them beyond a complete rewrite. I'm now at the point where I really wish I didn't, partially on account of seeing how much I've developed as a writer and person since, but also so that I could scavenge chunks of it that had potential. Then again, maybe it's better that I'm rebuilding from what I thought were the good parts with the foresight I have now, rather than seeing the actual thing and writing it off entirely.

Since then, I started to realise what the actual story I wanted to tell here was, and the outlines of the world started to shape themselves into something that would serve it entirely. I put together notes, rewrote those notes, started to fully come into myself as a writer and game dev, put together a world map, rewrote those notes again, realised reading makes you a better writer, scrapped and redid the world map, rewrote the rewritten notes, and so on and so forth. It became something with an actual direction, and the push and pull of both the narrative and world started to serve and influence each side rather than one butting up awkwardly against the other.

It's since reached a point where I've been needing to put out Something about this world, just for the sake of my own sanity, even after forking off immortals from it and doing some other stuff with them. I put out one tiny part, more as a game mechanic experiment than anything else, which didn't satisfy much as this is in an entire other dimension that Ousenta was distinct from, with our protagonists being former residents of the country. I wanted to show off Ousenta itself, then met with the problem that it "wasn't done yet". You see, this world is an equivalent of modernity as we know it, which gives us about 10,000 years of city civilisation that we're standing on top of. To build that up from scratch, if you can believe it, takes a lot of time and research to make something entertaining and plausible, which would condemn the thing to be years and years of development away before it was ready to show off.

However, something that happened during my dissertation, as much as I don't think the actual result is that great, is that I started to break away from the idea that a story needs such intricate worldbuilding to actually function. Thanks to my introduction to the concept from the subreddit, I was convinced that before I started work on any story, world and climate maps had to be made to Wikipedia-level accuracy. It also needed the entire solar system to be built. And a system of timekeeping. And all the rivers and water systems to know where nations would come about. And a conlang that comes about from that nation. And then the locations and structures and languages of all the other states in the world. And... I was on a time limit of three months, also juggling a group final project, and I rather quickly realised I would not submit this in time if I built everything with the accuracy and to the extent that many worlds I saw on Reddit were reaching for. It was entirely serviceable, as it turns out, for a story to be told in a world where one of the key nations that impacted everything had a single note that said "this is basically america", because the audience will never see that note. It was critical for breaking me out of this mindset, and eventually brought me to where I am today.

Since then, I've made a lot of games and written a lot of words. Almost all of those games are self-contained, and are one-off pieces that I never really have to think about the wider world of outside of what the characters see. I've found myself in a comfortable stride where I can take an idea, put some loose "worldbuilding" dressing on it, and make a compelling and clean story that people are engaged with. Quinn & Flynn is a prime example of this. The world practically doesn't exist beyond vague staging for three men to have sex with each other, and only became what it was because I figured out where the characters should go next. Any worldbuilding that can be taken or implied from it are entirely incidental and have very little external weight to them. I thought about them, obviously, but if you ask me what the actual political mechanisms of the monarchy mentioned, like, two times are? I dunno. Whichever gets the point of ACAB across the most.

I've done stuff that does get more substantial, a key one being ALL EYES ON THE SAINT. But, I still really don't care about the world outside of how the characters navigate it, and only built structures that the characters interact with directly. The other Wings? I made a note of what they'd be in case I mentioned them, and have no care for how they function. If you walked outside those city walls, there would be absolutely nothing there. I don't even know who the people attacking it are, because, in the end, it doesn't matter to the church, only that someone is an enemy.

No Saints, however, is a world I have put so much thought into it's an almost comical antithesis of this. There's a stupid number of parts all moving in tandem just to support a plot twist I have for exactly one storyline, and then all those parts themselves imply many other things that could be spun off into other stories, which I indulged, and then those stories also have a stupid number of parts all moving in tandem, because it turns out designing a realistic modern world produces a lot of moving parts. It then begs the question of where those parts come from, and how you actually make them move in the first place.

Ways of Worldbuilding

The worldbuilding approach I was first familiar with demands that you build significant parts of the world before any story can be written. For the sake of brevity, and to pay... tribute? I hesitate to say respect because being frank /r/worldbuilding is dogshit and they won't shut the fuck up about the flaccidity of magic systems, but let's call this Reddit worldbuilding.

In the school of Reddit worldbuilding, before you ever set pen to paper, your first job is to create a world map. Before you create that map, you need to put down tectonic plates to find out what mountains in your world will come about. In fact, it's better to go one step further and build all the other planets you'd find in this solar system, and figure out the details of the planet's orbit, giving you the exact length of a year and the temperature of the world that you can plug into a simulator. Oh, you should also learn the basics of GPlates so you can draw things on a sphere accurately and measure things on your globe, and then you can do a twenty-step and three spreadsheet-long process of figuring out your temperature gradients, and maybe you should actually just learn GPlates in full so you can get hundreds of millions of years of history of your planet to make the rock types those mountains are accurate and it has now been two years and instead of putting a single word in your manuscript, you're now on your third iteration of how glacial retreat impacts your northern fjords because the first two climate maps didn't make a distinction between Dwa and Dsa zones.

Now, this approach isn't without intent. Consider how much of your life is impacted just from the geography you happen to find yourself in, and then consider how much of your culture is a result of it. Cuisine is a prime example of this. If you want to build a civilisation, they're going to need some staple crops, and how will you know what those crops are if you don't know what the weather's doing? Also, check where the "origins of civilisation" (or more accurately, sedentary cultures) all come from. River basins. You're not getting mass agriculture in the middle of a dusty steppe. If you want something Earth-like, you need to follow Earth's rules, especially if you're building something from as close to scratch as you can get.

One of the best implementations I've seen of this is Worldbuilding Notes' series on building an island from nothing. Here, Ewa sets out to build a fully developed ecosystem and culture that sits on top of it, starting from just a landmass and a climate, deciding on a small island in a cold oceanic biome. However, this goes against Ewa's personal desires and aesthetics; she loves dense forests, but the limitations she's picked give her barren plains on account of high winds and human intervention. So, she designs a type of tree that's evolved to be resistant to winds, and then develops a system of magic that means humans have reason to keep them around. Because we have a tension between what realism demands, and what the author wants, a story is made from the resolution between the two.

And that's where the diversion from Reddit worldbuilding comes about, and why flexibility in this approach is a requirement for making something with actual substance. Reddit worldbuilding wouldn't allow for such deviation, and then demands complete and consistent mechanisms for how magic in your world works, fully explained for the audience. Or, if you wanted to have those wind-resistant trees, the logical step is to then build out an entire speculative biosphere, and keep carefully adjusting parameters until you produce an environment where those trees could "reasonably" evolve on their own. Yes, there is absolutely a story to be had from that evolution in itself, and there's a reason people want to study and map out the Earth's ecosystem in the first place, but often going to the extreme end of worldbuilding gives you very little wiggle room to take a narrative and run with it. Or more, the story you want to tell gets swamped in trying to make all those details consistent, to then get nitpicked by people who've watched every Artifexian video and took every wrong lesson from them, going through all these steps just for the bragging rights to brandish at  other worldbuilders, because God knows no-one else would give a shit, with the three paragraphs of their award-winning trilogy untouched since November.

There's also the point of, well, the point. Some people are building planets and worlds to such intense detail because they love the process itself. They're not here to make a construction to further the point of a story, but just because they love pouring over geography papers and finding new and obscure geographical features, or thinking really hard about how some freakish alien creature could actually exist on Earth. Some people are happy doing that, building entire planets in this manner, and then leaving them to rest to move onto the next. Why? Well, why do anything? Exoplanets are cool.

The problem here is that many people who want to spend their time as storytellers, like myself before, get caught in this trap of believing that every worldbuilding project needs all those parts that everyone else has. Some people are doing it just because others did and believe it's a necessity, and others are doing it so they can feel morally superior over their topology maps accurate to a level that would make the Ordnance Survey blush, even if they go through all that effort just to make Japan 2 again. You go through what everyone's expecting you to do, instead of asking: "What do I want to do?" and realising you can put cool things in your world simply because you think they are cool. It is also perfectly fine, it turns out, to just put a story together entirely on your own whim and build a world out of whatever result you get.

That then brings us to the opposite extreme of this, where people just slap random *-punk aesthetics together with no real thought or reason behind them, and then demand people give a shit about their work having less flavour than water. Here's a game: go to /r/worldbuilding, have a leisurely scroll through the top posts (ie, the shit people in the community care about), and take a swig for how many posts are just an image of a "protagonist" with no context, a map that tells you nothing about the world it represents, or a chart about how we're doing fantasy racism again but it's innovative this time we promise. Finish your drink if there's another version of Japan 2, or, even better, the ever-coveted America 2. Once you've sobered up, you'll realise people are just chasing pretty pictures for a squeeze of dopamine, that are then immediately forgotten when the next pretty picture comes along.

That makes the ones that have their pretty pictures backed up with some kind of "realism", such as Ewa's projects, or something like Vekllei, look like absolute standouts in this regard. It's also because you can immediately tell that instead of building such worlds to accuracy for the sake of accuracy, you can tell that accuracy is to expound on a specific idea they're trying to play with. You can immediately clock Ewa's interest in fantasy literature and anthropology, and Hobart's interest in Cold War armaments and speculative economics, and the reason they can go into such depth with them is their willingness to actually read a damn book, because it's subjects they enjoy.

For Ousenta, after finally breaking from that mould and realising what I actually wanted to spend my time on, was finding a balance between enough Reddit worldbuilding to use as prompts, but also enough space to handwave and adjust things as I wish. Effectively, I'm giving myself enough "random" material to take inspiration from real-world sources, but also giving me enough leeway to say "it's like that because it's like that" as I please. I do not want to spend the next 4 months subtly adjusting mountain ranges and planet perimeters to get the Earth-accurate climates I want when I could be writing the downfall of aristocracies instead. If I put my botched Köppen maps of the continent out there, I know I'm going to get actual PhD-level geographers in my comments saying "well, in fact, because of the way this mountain range is positioned and the prevailing winds that would come of it, this steppe you've put all your narrative focus on would actually have entirely different seasons!" To that I say: it's like that because it's like that. But it's much easier to say that when you don't have the actual scrutable data out there, particularly in a world where such data would be accurate to, well, the exact parameters we're using today.

Of course, this approach satisfies me, and it may not satisfy someone else. They could be running a hard sci-fi story where every point of data is turned into a plot point, and if they're making hard sci-fi, chases are they like the process of figuring out that data to a decent level of real-world accuracy; see points above on why those example projects hit the "realism" that they do. This is also why it's impossible to put out a one-size-fits-all approach to worldbuilding. Like any story, it's entirely down to the intent of the author and what they want out of it, and more often than not you can figure out exactly what peaks an author's interests from the things they hone in on.

Worldbuilding Through Negative Space

All of this brought me to an important question: how did I actually want to show off what I've done with the world of No Saints? I knew of ways, and one way that really didn't appeal to me, which I'll get into a little bit later.

While doing my dissertation, the whole idea of a worldbuilding piece vs a narrative piece were actually giving me the prototypes of what I'd like to do. The intent, at least, was to see if people connected to a world through "pure" objective worldbuilding, or a subjective narrative. It's pretty obvious why the narrative was subjective, being personal thoughts and opinions in someone's diary. But, the "pure" worldbuilding piece was also subjective. You see, that collection of in-universe documents were specifically gathered together by a character, and then annotated by him for the sake of another character. That's narrative. Not traditional, nor with a strict plot or act structure, which tripped me up into thinking it wasn't, even though I was blatantly playing with story that would arise from this. I had the awareness that any in-universe text would have a bias, and knew there was no real way to solve this problem, so instead of trying to fight this I leaned into it, and that led to some fun interactions between the two. The guy would find ways to bolster up the reputation of the country he likes living in. The history book funded by the government of another would find every opportunity to criticise it. The fun part, we then have to decide who's telling the truth, or if there's even any truth at all. "Pure" worldbuilding, and objective? Not even slightly, and it was far more interesting for it.

That then brings about the question of what "pure" worldbuilding actually is, which I believe is putting everything into documentation or a wiki. Not, quite critically, an in-universe wiki that people would use to get information about the world they live in, but a wiki for us to understand this world, as written by the author, telling us every tiny detail that they've put into it. That's about as close to "pure" worldbuilding as you can get. It doesn't abstract itself in any way, and can be considered an objective source that the author themselves could (and more than likely, is) using as reference material for anything else they make.

There was another thing I discovered while working on those dissertation pieces. A good portion of that (scrapped) world, much to my surprise, came about because of the materials I was making. Some of that I knew would come about in some minor sense, such as fully fleshing out the details of a history book, but then I found questions I didn't ever consider once I starting thinking about how people actually interacted with this world. Such as, hang on, if someone's moved to this country, how would immigration work? How would finding work go? What would be the general reaction from the populace to them moving there? And thus I had to make outlines. Then it came to the smaller stuff. Someone is decorating their diary, what do they decorate it with? What stationary and pens do they use? Stickers? Of what? If there's pictures, do they print them? Develop them? I would like some post stamps in here. Shit, what's on the post stamps? What do they deem important enough to put on there? Who's putting it on there? Do they even use post stamps to begin with?

You can build to as much accuracy as you want, but until you actually stress test the thing, everything's running on hypotheticals. There's parts I planned out and when I hit them in Diet of Worms I thought, well, that's not how this would work. So I adjusted them as I went. That could have been a sore point if, say, that canon wiki was public and under scrutiny. Or worse, people latch onto the old version and refuse to consider any amends to it.

So, here's how I'm making the world of No Saints. There is a giant fuck-off Obsidian vault that sits on my harddrive. It contains culture notes, events, characters and their exact motivations, all in terse and concise bullet points that describe the world to complete canon accuracy. And no-one is going to see this besides me. Ever. It's the Absolute Truth, lays out everything with precise dates, and the most the audience will ever see is an academic paper that estimates that a critical historical event happened some time in a hundred-year period. And that could get retconned in a year when someone else publishes a paper on how it actually happened three centuries before that.

My intentions for the world of No Saints are not to infodump everything as a canon wiki, but to present the world as in-universe texts and materials, of which each batch I've 'curated', so to say, to tell a micro-story on its own. Here's a holy book contrast to commentaries made hundreds of years after it was written. Here's an autobiography, which is a scan from one of the versions sat in a library, contrast to the in-universe version of its Wikipedia page complete with edit wars. As for my role in this, I will never confirm or deny if any information presented in these materials are "canon" or not, only that they exist within this world. Is that Wikipedia page accurate? See what sources you can find. Do you trust them? That's for you to decide.

That gives me enough structure to give everything realistic weight, but also more than enough wiggle room to adjust things as I please, and in those adjustments, narrative will happen on its own. Let's say, I decide that a historical battle happens in 1209 instead of 1210. Suddenly all the documents I've put out are inaccurate, while the ones I've yet to make I can quietly correct with the new date. What to do about those that already exist? This book has a misprint. This publishing house is notorious for lack of quality control. This author confused the date with another significant event. It was previously believed [date] was when this happened, but now other evidence has come about that challenges it. It might be the wrong information forever! And the best part? Because no-one's ever going to see that canon wiki, no-one will ever know if I planned this from the beginning or decided to change it at the eleventh hour. Suddenly we have the world evolving from the story of myself actually building it, all because of indecision over a date.

If you've gone the canon wiki route, it's now just a page update and a message to your audience. Nothing else happens. 

This touches on a problem I have with many of these Reddit worldbuilding projects, that they entirely neglect that what makes a narrative an actual narrative is the human aspect of the whole thing. Even those "worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding" projects, at least those looking to be publicised, still require this; that's how you get people to give a shit about anything. Earth is just a planet, but once it's in motion and evolving, and humans start to see story emerging from its existence, now there's a desire to find out as much as possible about it. Your planet might be interesting enough for people to hunt for the "story", or you can plant the seeds to make them start digging. Critically, you can use this drive to your advantage by simply not giving your audience all the answers. People have a lot of hangups on finding the Absolute Truth, and if you tell them that there is an Absolute Truth, ie, a series of events that definitely did happen, and that they can find those events if they connect the right dots, you've offloaded half the storytelling to them and they didn't even realise it. And they might even think it's fun. Many worldbuilders are either adverse to doing this or don't even know it's an option.

Part of this, I think, comes from the angle of engaging with media from a fandom perspective, which then bleeds over to new authors, and in this case, new worldbuilders. A world must have the world map, and it must have characters with full biographies, and it must have all the canonical events in an easily-digestible list. Fan-wikis are a pillar of fandom communities, and what most people neglect is the fan aspect of this. They come about as a natural consequence of a piece of media existing, and a fan picking apart every detail that the author has fed them. As much as a fan-wiki records events as accurately as they can, they often have to wrestle with the actual source material. Was this battle told from the perspective of a specific character? Are there details they wouldn't record on account of simply not seeing them, or deliberately excluding them, or just not thinking they were important? Is this battle even a real event, and can we verify this? If the battle is a legend, how much does it speak to how much this society values fiction against non-fiction, if such a distinction even exists to them? A worldbuilder creating the Definitive And Canon Wiki where everything is true and nothing is debatable, that aspect gets robbed from the audience. Why would anyone speculate on what could transpire around that battle, if they can just look at the wiki page and have the author tell them what they should think?

The intentional worldbuilding of negative space is something I almost never see discussed. Sure, people can argue about if X general was justified in raiding Y town, but there's never a question of if the report itself is accurate, because the worldbuilder never allows the space for it. Subtext is something you never stop hearing about for traditional narratives, but it practically never comes up in a conversation about worldbuilding. Part of that, I think, is a lack of vocabulary around worldbuilding techniques and also a lack of recognition of worldbuilding as a narrative tool. Once more, if you look up "how to worldbuild", you're going to get a hundred guides on how to draw maps.

And all that to say, people will still create massive worldbuilding wikis that are undeniably canon and quintuple the effort of any novel or comic they may or may not come out of it. And that's fine! You can do whatever you want forever. I only feel that there's incredible potential here with such stories that can be explored, and as far as I know very few worlds make an effort to present themselves in such a way.

Which is also to say, if you know of any, for the love of god tell me about them.

Diet of Worms is intended to be this idea in every way I could stretch it with the book alone. I know exactly what events in the book are true, and where Kerefanha went, and instead all you're getting is his botched recollection of the trip and four hundred years of its impact. Everything is in eternal conversation with everything else, and this is what I feel worldbuilding truly is, and what makes it a unique means to communicate narrative in itself. Rather than just being a static timeline of events, with a document that gives you every answer on what the author intended from the world, we should try abandoning that as a structure and instead create things as fully immersed in the world itself. The meta-narrative of Diet of Worms is how much potential I believe this has.

The game, as much as "game" is a pretty loose descriptor, but one I still find useful, is not the material itself, but between the material and the player. The material gives the player enough jumping points, and is rooted to that canon series of events, but it's up to them to connect whatever dots they may find, and up to me designing to throw them off at every turn. 

Of course, they may not play into that at all. They may just read the wiki, flick through the book, and think it's pretty cool and move on. I mean, Austen tells you this directly:

"What you take from Diet of Worms is as much as you put into it."

And underlined on page 11, with people "feeling a great need to engage with the book in any sense", which was really a risk on my part in hoping this would all land, which fortunately paid off with everyone I've spoken to going feral with a desperate need to talk about it.

So What's Next?

This project was an interesting one. It's a thing I knew I would have fun with, but the trial run was more if other people would as well. Normally this is something I don't really give a shit about, but given that, you know, half the point comes from audience participation and theorycrafting, finding out if anyone actually cared was pretty important. I had a few No Saints projects I was looking at as possible LBK candidates, in varying stages of completion, and Diet of Worms was one of them. Once the jam rolled around and the Unhinged Group Dynamics theme was announced, I realised that Diet of Worms would be a perfect fit, smashed that together with the wiki idea, and then decided to see if I could put out a 40k word novella in a month. If I didn't? I dunno. The PDF's corrupt and there's a chunk missing. Fortunately I didn't need to resort to that.

Writing it was fun. Typesetting it with all the grime was even more fun. I did the whole thing in Illustrator and it swept me right back to doing that dissertation piece back in uni, which was a nice full circle moment for the whole thing. Also I know I should have done it in InDesign instead I know that shut up.

The raw writing itself was... both more and less intensive than I expected? Shifting voices between the wiki itself, the person editing it, the book preface, the book proper, and then something for the comments was a challenge, but, that was also going against the fact I really enjoy writing, as I have to keep stressing, so it was basically like giving my brain heroin for a month. That said, if I'm doing a wiki again I'm absolutely not doing revision history and comments the same way I did here, because I did it all by hand in HTML. And yes, I know there are at least fifty better ways to do this with web tech, but we were already late to the deadline and this is what we call the Game Dev Special.

Never again though. Jesus fucking Christ.

This project also continues to remind me that it turns out working with other people is a good idea. Sure, I could learn how blender actually works, probably, but why do that when I could hand off the book render to someone who can leverage their own experience to inject storytelling angles I didn't even know were possible? And then I just wake up one morning and the wiki is there fully coded and styled? I should do this more often.

If this thing flopped, I was fully prepared to write off the whole thing and go back to the drawing board on how to bring the world of No Saints into this one. The good news is that I'm not doing that. I'm now fully happy to say the book and crusty pdf are "canon", that meaning, they exist in-universe as actual documents. They obviously aren't written in English but that's getting handwaved on account of you not being able to read the damn thing. For the wiki page, something Wikipedia-adjacent does exist, but not as it's seen right now. It's pretty minor in how it's not in the grand scheme of things, but it's enough that I want to leave it as a trial run. Also because its existence reminds me of the code crimes I commit.

One thing that's certain, is that all the words you see are temporary. Hikensu is a conlang I developed while barely understanding linguistics, and it fucking sucks, and I'm redoing the whole thing from the ground up which means at some point there will be an update with all the correct words. Half the shit you see are just sounds I glued together at random, and the other half is what stuck in my head from the old stuff, because all those conlang spreadsheets got nuked. "Ousenta" might stay because I'm fairly sentimental about the name, but we'll see. Also, before anyone loses their minds over it, the script seen on the front of the book is gibberish. It's just shapes. It was me doing a draft of what Jazeo might look like and I'm not happy with it yet. It had a design that was since lost, you guessed it, with the old world wipe, and it would need revisions anyway.

Even with some glaring holes, and a fair bit of work I still need to do before I'm completely confident pushing out more in-universe materials, my approach still lets me hack away at certain pieces while the rest of it churns away in the background. And, from what I've said before, this actually lends me to a better narrative by the end, rather than just hermitting and coming out with the next thing years of worldbuilding later. At least three of them are doable as-is once I've got that new version of the language down. One is an in-universe podcast with two guys talking about Ousentan religion that goes a little off the rails, but that's roadblocked on account of me only having one voice and also having zero money.

The "big one" of these, and what the trial run of Diet of Worms was really about, is planned to be an Ousentan-centric version of Wikipedia, with all the political drama and biases that brings. After episode 0, we'll start following the perspective of Cammira, a detective investigating the disappearance of a cult from the northern capital. Basically it's Omnipedia, except the editors have names and you can follow their slap fights on the forums.

There will also be "standard" stories I'll be doing with this setting. This part is just really fun to play with, and the more time I spend pratting about here the stronger those stories will get. That wiki one is the hopeful launching point of the one main storyline I keep talking about. How's that going to manifest in being a novel or game or something else? Fuck if I know. That's for me in like six years to figure out.

But, before I get into that, I still have a lot to sort out before then. Ousenta itself, as much as it looks like I've got everything figured out, still has a lot of questions I need to answer, that then create questions of everyone else. I need to define the full geopolitical landscape, who likes and hates who, and how everyone got to this point. I also need to read. A lot. As much as the general shape is there, many aspects I want to dive into are blocked on account of me simply not knowing how shit works. Some of those shapes are so flaky it's not even worth calling them half-baked. I haven't even mixed the batter yet.

Which! also means that as I hit those bits that need developing, more of these little chunks of in-universe texts will come about as I start exploring them. They're more than likely to be a far smaller scale than Diet of Worms and probably won't have some kind of meta-narrative, but I'm also someone known to grossly underestimate the length and depth of the things I make. I estimated SEXTUPLE L at around 20k words.

Currently, I haven't got immediate plans for more stuff for No Saints. CHILDREN OF HELL is still my priority, and it feels like the next thing I need to make on my path as a dev. But, as I mentioned before, I'm far from done with this. I've got those plans for what I want to make next (or perhaps, what I need to make next as the foundation for everything else), and that will be sitting patiently on the backburner until it's time.

Until then, those interested can hop into my Discord to chat about the world with others who enjoyed it. I won't guarantee I'll answer all your questions about this and where it's going, on account of the above, but I might throw a bone or two your way. I mostly want to be a nosy cunt and see what everyone's saying and theorising about it. If you're also particularly interested in hearing about one thing in particular, it might persuade me to start exploring it more, and might even encourage me to drop a piece about it.

I love this world dearly. I'm glad other people love it as much. And of everything, I'm glad I'm now matured enough as an artist that I can make people love it as much as I do.

hey guess what

I'm adding this in after editing; when I hit the point about nuking my dissertation work I realised, hang on, didn't I put this up on my site as a way to share it and get responses? It turns out, yes, I did. I also never deleted it on the web server and just hid the link years ago, prompting me to entirely forget about it between website overhauls. The old version of this world still lives and is BACK on my harddrive.

I won't be sharing this one, and it's been taken down from my site for the people who might try crawling the whole thing. I might share a segment or two that becomes of interest later, but for now it's just for me to ogle and cannibalise.

And you know what? In some ways it really wasn't as bad as I remembered. The political angle is half-committal, and the writing is shaky in a way you'd expect from someone just finding their voice, but who would I be to never rag on a baby writer for such a thing if I also can't extend that grace to myself? Just-cracked egg Stan did alright. I'm now set on making this far far better than he ever could, and that really excites me.