Ikarus

What is this? A cool tool to build describe your world using words and windows Who would like this? Tolkiens, Tinkerers, Messy Dungeon Masters, Utility Fans How do I feel when I use it? Like I just found all my action figures from childhood but I can program them like little robots Ikarus is the first software I have used for world-building. Before Ikarus, I used spreadsheets (tough to set up and complex to set up logical relationships between cells involving text) or good ol' pen and paper (I lost this, so much of this). Ikarus immediately solved some of the problems with my other methods. Ikarus allows the flexibility of pen and paper while also allowing the user to build in nested properties (think submenus in a game). The experience of creating new blueprints/attributes/instances is pretty seamless with an intuitive workflow that mixes tabs and windows that split in a way that makes sense (e.g. opening two blueprints opens a second tab in the top right window). This leads to intuitive interactions that felt very easy and fun. While the interface was fairly straight-forward (given some background in world-building and programming), I definitely recommend checking out the tutorial (currently 7 minutes) as even an experienced builder/coder may need to check it out. Though if you like to tinker, you could definitely find all the features by poking around and trying to build your own world. The good news is that the early version is light and really quick to use, so playing around is easy. I am really excited to see how this develops further and to learn how to integrate this into my current workflow. It already is a very quick and user friendly tool to generate a large set of inter-related elements which I think will be excellent to use as a story writing prompt. Not to mention the current development timeline indicates a lot of cool features on the horizon including a timeline builder and a map editor. Combining these tools with the existent software would make for a powerful suite of tools for the early stages of any creative pursuit. I wish that there was more visual representation of the data that you put into the program. While the current look does a great job of organizing content (using windows and tabs), I think that many users (including myself) might prefer to see alternative representations of their data (trees, tables) as well as have the ability to manipulate data in a visual representation. Moreover it would be cool to be able to export data in different formats, especially for integrating this software into a build flow.