Writing:Your First Age

In the game, go to the Seltani District and head to the Book Gallery. (Along the shoreline, turn right at the fork.) Step into the niche marked by a cluster of balloons.

The linking book before you is the Age called Ascheta. It contains the tools you’ll need to create worlds. Link to Ascheta, and then open the book titled “My Worlds.”

This should open a new window (or browser tab) showing a table titled. (If you see a “Permission Denied” screen, then your account has not been given build permission – see Caveats.)

"Alternatively, you could skip the walk and link directly to the “Your worlds” screen at this URL: http://dev.seltani.net/build. But don’t you feel more engaged if you begin by strolling through the City, travelling to your private study, settling down at the big desk, and getting to work? Sure you do."

Create the world
At any rate, it’s time to create your first Age. Press the  button in the lower right. It will give you a confirmation prompt; press  to continue.

The screen now shows a world named. Take a moment to check out the screen layout. The menu bar (beneath the Seltani banner) has links for  (your list of worlds),   (which you just created), and a menu of location (currently empty). Beneath that are tables showing various properties of the world, which are mostly still blank.

The first thing we’ll do is change the world name. is banal. Click on that text – the entry in the  table, next to the heading.

Turns out this is an editable text entry! Change it to. When you begin typing, the entry row turns yellow and  buttons appear. Press  when the world name suits you.

"Always be sure to entries when you are finished working on them. If you leave the page, any remaining yellow rows will be reverted to their original contents."

(Ignore the  and   entries for now.)

Create a location
At the bottom of the page is an empty “Locations” table. Press the  button. Presto, you are on a page titled.

Still banal. Again, you have the ability to change the location’s name. Click on  in the table, change it to , and hit.

While you’re at it, click on the string  (next to the   header), change it to , and save that. This is a short lower-case string which we will use to identity the location later on.

The second table on the page has one row:  This is the description text for the location. Leave the first two columns alone, and edit the  part. Change it to say... let me see now...

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That’s it! We now have an Age with one nicely-described location. If you jump back to the world screen (click  in the menu bar), you’ll see   listed in the   table.

Visit the location
A world is no fun if you can’t stand there and look around. How to do this?

Go back to the location screen if you’re not already there. (Select  in the   table, or from the pull-down menu in the menu bar.)

In the right middle of the page is a button. Press it and confirm. This adds a page to your character’s linking booklet, linking to the new location.

You can explore the game in one browser window while you build in another window. In fact, this is the best way to build. Try this now: open a second window, visit http://dev.seltani.net/, and enter the Cavern. You should see a new entry in your booklet pane:. (If not, did you confirm the  command?)

Select this link. (The linking page will be hazy. We’ll fix that later. It’s functional, just not artistically embellished yet.) Now touch the page.

You are standing at the foot of a hill...

Try editing the descriptive text (in the build window) while you’re standing there (in the game window). You can see the room description update every time you hit  on the   property.

Add a close-up view
In the build window, add square brackets around the word “grass”:

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The “grass” now appears as a hyperlink in the game window, but it doesn’t work yet. (If you click it, you’ll see a “Symbol not found” error.) To make this work, press the  button in the build window. This adds a new line to the  table.

Change the  entry to the word. Leave the  selector as-is. In the third column, enter this text:

""

Once that’s saved, the “grass” link in the game will pop up a close-up view window.

Sharing your work
Currently, you can do this by adding your link to the public bookshelf in the Book Gallery.

This is obviously not ideal – for one thing, anybody can delete links from the public bookshelf. Eventually it will be possible to create links in your own worlds. Once there is enough traffic, there will also be library Ages linked from Seltani.