I am the founder, BDFL, leader, "oh no! that guy" or whatever you want to call it of this merry band of amazing and lovable writers. I also run this blog. Hope you have liked the fine work you have seen so far. My post is going to be a bit different from the norm. It is not going to be fiction at all, but a review of a tool that may be useful for the writers among you. It is going to be in an informal style and covers the basics for our needs without going into too much depth about all the features.
This post is about "World Building" using MindMup. It is a web-based mind-mapping software focused on making it quick, easy and smooth to use. I would definitely agree with them about meeting their intended goal but regarding world-building I'd say the end results decent but mixed.
To that end, I put utilized a world I have created already with the free version of their program to see how quick and easy a good Mindmap tool could be for our purpose of making a visual for a living breathing world and easily accessing all the information. The results are encouraging but only up to a point.
For example, I only got into the general details of things but if I really got into depths such as adding more cities, adding the 12 subdivisions of the city of El-Tash, completing the entire criminal underground structure, all the noble houses and families, all the notable figures of all layers of society, all the known people of lesser significance, people linked to places (such as the bartender at a popular inn), the marketplace notables, and so forth, this map would easily have been about 100 times more complex. To cut a long story short, it is good for small less complex works like a short story but insufficient for large worlds or novels.
I would say its organization and movability of nodes could use some flexibility and a more sophisticated algorithm to allow better separation still it is better than a lot of other tools out there. Still not bad overall I'd say.
Now the positive parts:
Here is the mindmap image I created to give you an idea:
This post is about "World Building" using MindMup. It is a web-based mind-mapping software focused on making it quick, easy and smooth to use. I would definitely agree with them about meeting their intended goal but regarding world-building I'd say the end results decent but mixed.
To that end, I put utilized a world I have created already with the free version of their program to see how quick and easy a good Mindmap tool could be for our purpose of making a visual for a living breathing world and easily accessing all the information. The results are encouraging but only up to a point.
For example, I only got into the general details of things but if I really got into depths such as adding more cities, adding the 12 subdivisions of the city of El-Tash, completing the entire criminal underground structure, all the noble houses and families, all the notable figures of all layers of society, all the known people of lesser significance, people linked to places (such as the bartender at a popular inn), the marketplace notables, and so forth, this map would easily have been about 100 times more complex. To cut a long story short, it is good for small less complex works like a short story but insufficient for large worlds or novels.
I would say its organization and movability of nodes could use some flexibility and a more sophisticated algorithm to allow better separation still it is better than a lot of other tools out there. Still not bad overall I'd say.
Now the positive parts:
- It is indeed very quick and easy to use and the shortcuts are quick to learn and after that things fly. In no time you will be adding child, parent and sibling nodes; it really does not hinder your flow.
- You can color code the nodes for categorizing. In my example, gangs are red, noble subdivision is purple and slums are brown.
- Lines can be created for additional linkage for relations and they can be color-coded as well as can be solid or dashed. I used those to depict things like strong hostilities (red), strong alliances (blue), mild tensions (dashed reds), light affiliations (dashed blues), trade exchanges (yellow lines), and so forth.
- Each node can have a text note added, which can give you more information about it. So that is quite useful and gives you an extra layer in case you wanted to look up things like details of a person, architecture, key points of that location, prices for various services or trade goods even. Pretty handy.
- Further for each node, you have a Measurement Table that is essentially a list of items with values. A table of items which in my case were "Trade Goods" such as iron, tin, wood etc. This table makes it easy to see which commodity is available to a location and as such what it can provide in trade. Useful information to have.
Here is the mindmap image I created to give you an idea:
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