Wikis are commonly used in game design, as it makes the documentation easier to use and share, and easier to break down into smaller more manageable chunks. But one of the things that wiki software sadly doesn’t do well are graphs and tables.
Perhaps some wiki software exists that handles tables properly, but MediaWiki definitely doesn’t, which is very annoying as it’s the most commonly used wiki software (it’s the one based on Wikipedia). To make a table you have to edit the page source and use all sorts of weird bracket combinations to indicate rows and columns. That means it will take just a few minutes before you’ll want to staple your face.
I don’t know why I didn’t come up with this before, but here’s a PRO TIP! that I got from another game designer last week. It’s so good you might want to sit down for this. Okay, are you ready? Here’s what you do: 1) create a spreadsheet in Google Documents and 2) use the embed code to integrate it into the wiki page. Whoa! You can even generate graphs based on your data and drop them into the wiki knowing that they’ll always be up-to-date.
And the world is a better place.
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