The Wongery

So, after years of preparation and planning, today finally marks the official opening of the Wongery. Which is currently exciting to no one but us, because we've kept the project under wraps and haven't told anyone else anything about it.

Honestly, we'd hoped to have a lot more content by the launch date. But, well, we've already put it off several times. When we first put up the Central Wongery, the main page said it would go public in March 2009. Only a week or so later, we pushed that back to summer 2009. When by June it became clear we weren't going to be ready by then, we changed the launch date to January 2010, and then in December 2010 to January 2011. Finally, in May 2011, we changed that to "late 2012", with the edit summary "Okay, this is the last push-back." And... well, we still don't have nearly as much content as we wanted to have by now, but we said that was the last push-back, and we're sticking to it. (I guess technically it's still "late 2012" for another week and a half, but it's not as if in that week and a half would make much difference, and we may as well get it up before the holidays.)

So, anyway, if you haven't read the site intro (which you probably should, really), the Wongery is a site dedicated to imaginary worlds. Specifically, the main purpose of the Wongery is to share some imaginary worlds that we (the people in charge of the site, who rather arrogantly call ourselves the Grandmaster Wongers) made up, as well as to give other users the opportunity to share their own creations, if they want to.

A lot of the site features that we'd hoped to have present, though, aren't implemented yet. Still, like I said, we don't want to put it off any longer, so we put up what we've got. But here's a preview of a few of the other features that we'd wanted to have up and that should eventually be forthcoming, in what we think is the most likely order in which they'll appear.

• A Gazetteer with interactive maps of the worlds presented in the Wongery, allowing the viewers to zoom in and out and turn on and off different layers and features. (We have maps of most of the worlds, but they're rough maps drawn in pencil; we intend to put up more finished versions of the maps on the site.)

• A Gameroom (name may change—any suggestions?) with full statistics for many of the creatures, characters, and other matters described in the Wongery, for use with several different role-playing games, so you can use them in your games if you want to.

• A Workshop (name may change—any suggestions?) with graphics, icons, and 3D models of many of the creatures, characters, and other matters described in the Wongery, so you can use them in video games.

There are other features we may put up if there's enough interest and contributions to warrant them, including:

• A Gallery of artistic depictions of subjects described in the Wongery

• A Reading Room (name may change—any suggestions?) with fiction based on Wongery worlds.

The core of the Wongery, however, was always intended to be the Central Wongery, and that's up, although it doesn't yet have all the features we plan, and it's not as extensive as we'd hoped. We'd hoped to have at least a thousand articles up at launch; instead, we only have a few hundred. (It's not for want of material, just time—we have thousands of articles already in mind we want to write, and that's not counting all the red links, all of which we do intend to eventually cover... though by that time we'll surely have new red links to deal with.) But the Grandmaster Wongers are going to set a goal of, between us, adding at least one new article a day. That may seem like a lofty goal, given that in the several years the Wongery has been in the works we've only managed a fraction of that, but we're hoping actually having it public will motivate us to work on it more—it's easy to put it off when we know no one's seeing it anyway. (Eventually, we'd like each Grandmaster Wonger to contribute at least one article a day, preferably more—but hey, baby steps.) We were also hoping to have illustrations accompanying the articles, but... well, that one's mostly a question of money. None of the Grandmaster Wongers are professional artists, and we don't have the money to pay artists right now. (We do have rough pencil concept sketches of many of the Wongery creatures and concepts, but, we'd like the Wongery illustrations to look better than that.)

We've also got the Public Wongery going, where you can contribute your own articles. (Naturally, since the site just launched, there's nothing there yet, but we hope there soon will be.) And there's a forum, where you can, you know, discuss things, I guess. So the Wongery may not be all we aspire for it to be, but it's not entirely empty. And it's going to grow over time. We have big plans for this site. (And yes, we know the front page layout is terrible. That's going to change; what's there now is just a slapdash temporary thing. Also, we need to reskin the forum. Also... well, we've got a lot of work to do.)

For now, though... well, we said at the beginning of this post that we'd kept the project under wraps right now and hadn't told anyone about it. But now that it's launched... we're going to keep doing it. Not because we don't want anyone to know about it. Not because we're ashamed of its current state. Not because we don't have any money for advertising. Well, okay, partly that last one, but mostly just because we think it'll be more interesting to just put it out there and see if people stumble across it and if it spreads by word of mouth. Maybe it won't, but hey, we're not doing this for the money anyway. (Which is good, because we have no real plans in place for how it could possibly make us any money.) But if you did somehow stumble across the site, welcome! Hope you enjoy. And keep an eye on it, because it's going to grow.