Help:Creating a game

Anyone's welcome to add their own game to Ludocity, whether they're documenting something they've played before, or are working on a new game that hasn't been played yet.

This page explains how to create a page for your game. Because wiki pages can be edited at any time, though, there's no need to complete all the steps in one go - you can just add filler text and come back to them later. (If some of the other Ludocity users have played your game, they'll be happy to help you get the ruleset up to scratch.)

If you have any questions that aren't answered here, or want some help in writing up your game, leave a message on this article's discussion page. If you have a game ruleset already that you're happy to have on the site, and would like us to turn it into a wiki page for you, just email the ruleset to kevan@kevan.org and we'll sort everything out.

Creative Commons

Before adding a game to Ludocity, make sure that you understand how the Creative Commons process works. By submitting a game to the site, you are agreeing that anyone in the world can run your game, or republish the rules in a non-profit context. They must credit you as its designers, and they won't be allowed to make any money from it, but by publishing your game on this site, you are releasing it into the wild.

As such, you should only submit games which you have designed yourself, which have already been released under a suitable Creative Commons licence, or which you have explicit permission from the game designer to publish here.

If you're submitting an old game which is already in the public domain, you should label it as being public domain rather than creative commons (this is explained in the "add an infobox" section.)

Game page creation

Sign up to Ludocity

First things first: create a Ludocity account, then log in to the wiki with it.

Create the page

Pick a name for your game.

Enter this in the "search" box at the top of the site, to check that there isn't already a game of that name. If the game doesn't exist, the search results will begin with "There is no page titled "<your game name>". You can create this page." - click on "create this page" to create the page.

Add an infobox

Each game on Ludocity has an "infobox" in the corner that tells people who made the game, the number of players it takes, the stuff it needs, and how playable it is. Cut and paste the following infobox template, adding it to the top of your newly created page.

{{gameinfobox
|designer=A. N. Other
|image=
|players=2-7
|stuff=A chess board and three umbrellas.
|crew=One.
|preparation=Ten minutes.
|time=An hour, plus ten minutes for scoring.
|place=A swimming pool.
|activities=Swimming, bluffing, mental arithmetic.
|status=unfinished
}}

Change the designer name to your own name, and fill the other fields in as appropriate. Note that the designer name you choose will be the one that other people credit the game to, when they run the game themselves.

The status field tells other Ludocity players what state your game is in. A game's status can either be unfinished (you're still writing it), untested (you've finished writing it but haven't played it yet), tested (you've played it and it still needs some work) or playable (you've played it and it works well enough that other people should play it too).

If you want to give us an image of your game, you can upload it at Special:Upload, and then add it to the "image=" field in the infobox (eg. "image=Chess_Umbrella.jpg"). Please do not use copyrighted images for this; either provide a photo you've taken yourself, or find one on Flickr that's been issued under a Creative Commons licence, and link back to it in the image description, to give the photographer the credit they deserve.

Anything you list in the "activities" section will automatically have your game assigned to the relevant categories (eg. mentioning "chasing" will put it in Category:Chasing games). As such, make sure it makes at least some sense to add the word "game" after each activity, and try to keep each activity to just one common word (so that you'll overlap with some other games that use the same activity - "finding" rather than "scavenger hunting", "drawing" rather than "bespoke artwork creation").

If your game is in the public domain (either because it's an old party game that's already in the public domain, or because it's your own game and you would prefer to release it as public domain than through Creative Commons), you can add "|licence=public domain" to the list of fields, and the infobox will be flagged appropriately.

Introduce your game

Underneath the infobox code, write a sentence or two that summarises the theme and aim of the game.

Write up the rules

The rest of the article should consist of the rules and instructions of your game, separated by whatever headers you feel are appropriate. (To make a header, just click the button with the big "A" at the top of the edit window, or put a double-equals around the title, such as "==Setting up==".)

When writing up a ruleset, try to imagine that you’re writing out a set of instructions so that they could be printed out and given directly to the players. If there are a number of different roles - hunters and hiders, for example - or if preparation is required, it can be useful to separate these out into different parts of the ruleset: “Instructions for Hunters”, “Instructions for Hiders” and “Instructions for Preparation”, rather than one long essay describing the entire game.

Take a look at the existing rulesets to get an idea of how your ruleset should be formatted.

Upload handouts

If you've got any handouts that it'd be useful for someone to have when running the game (score sheets, playing cards, badges, background noises, artwork, maps, or whatever), upload them using the "Upload file" link at the bottom of the page, then add the following template to the article:-

{{handout
|file=yourhandoutfile.pdf
|image=yourthumbnail.png
|caption=A caption, if you want one.
}}

If you want to make a thumbnail of what the file looks like, you can upload it and use the "|image" field to point to that file. If you leave it blank ("|image="), it'll just use a default file icon.

Add videos and photos

If you've got any videos of the game being played, you can embed YouTube, Vimeo or Google Video footage by simply including calls to the template "youtube", "vimeo" or "googlevideo", with the ID of the video after the first pipe and (optionally) a caption after the second. (To see how this works, have a look at Holla-Lulu.) For example:-

{{youtube|r6LUfW7qnps|''Holla-Lulu'' being played at [[Iglab]], in Bristol.}}
{{youtube|Ifh8cnT0RdA}}
{{vimeo|1365158|The South Bank Stag Hunt at [[Hide and Seek|Hide and Seek 2008]].}}

If you've got another section below the videos, you should use the following template at the bottom of the "videos" section of the page, to stop it from overlapping the videos.

{{clear}}

If you or other players have some Flickr photos of the game, tag them with ludocity:game=yourgamehere and add the following template to your article to generate an automatic gallery for that tag. (For an example of this in practice, see Trap Street.)

{{flickr|yourgamehere}}

If you like, you can use Flickr's "thumbnail" size instead, for the gallery:-

{{flickr|yourgamehere|size=t}}

Make a creator page

If you want to make a game designer page with your name, feel free to do so - this will be automatically linked from the "Designer:" section of the infobox, if a wiki page with the same name exists.

You can write anything you like on this page; just make sure to put [[Category:Game designers]] at the bottom somewhere, so that it gets added to the "game designers" category.

The end

And that's it. Click "Save page", and your page will be created - the game will automatically appear in the relevant categories of the archive. If you want to make any tweaks or changes later on, just come back to the page and click "Edit".