Dev blog #15

Today I want to talk about the shiny new official Swarmdustry wiki, henceforth to be referred to as the Swarmpedia.

Steam post image(Picture is zoomed out so more stuff can fit in the screenshot)

Link: wiki.swarmdustry.com

As the game is approaching the Early Access release date, I thought having a centralized knowledge repository about the game is an important thing. I know for myself when I play similar games, I tend to google things to try to deeply understand how a certain mechanic works or how to obtain an item in a more efficient matter. Because 100% of the time that knowledge is not readily available in the game. And that's because the stuff you usually find on a Wiki comes from players and there's no reasonable way for a dev to offer all that knowledge inside the game. For instance, when I played Factorio for the first time a few years ago, I had no idea what I was doing or how things worked and the tutorial wasn't much help. So whenever I was stuck doing things, usually a youtube video or the factorio wiki would unblock me.

The Swarmpedia itself is still very much a work in progress. I created a page for each item and genetic code, but they only contain stats and nothing else. The main page also links to a number of pages where you can find gifs and deeper explanations about how some of the different main mechanics of the game work, like the worker distribution system.

For now, my aim is to kickstart the website with a skeleton structure and fill it with only a few pages that I find important for new players. It's not going to be a full complete Wiki just from my own contributions. I would like for the end state of this wiki to reach the same state as Rimworld's wiki which I find a gold standard in terms of wiki's, along with the OSRS wiki. Of course the Swarmpedia is open for everyone to contribute to, so you if you ever find a mistake or want to add something somewhere, please feel free to!

At first I was having doubts about creating the wiki myself as the dev because in my mind, a wiki was always this community led thing. Not only that but it is also pretty time consuming, time which I could spend on the game instead. But then I read about it and it was like fiding out Santa isn't real as a kid. Apparently, majority of wiki's today are created by devs or people associated with the devs/publisher. Apparently it's totally okay and even preferable for devs to at least establish the infrastructure and provide some baseline stats or content. So I went ahead and paid for a custom domain so that the wiki url can be truly official, and chose a wiki host that is ad free. For me honestly I play this mobile game which has a fandom wiki and it's a terrible experience whenever I open that wiki on my phone. Just ads everywhere. I wouldn't want that kind of experience associated with Swarmdustry to be honest.

Anyway, that's all for today folks, thanks for reading and happy gaming!