About Forge & Illusion

Our Vision

Forge & Illusion is a place for role-playing aficionados from all around Finland. It is our ambitious intention to create an open-source online service suited to seasoned role-playing veterans and newcomers alike.

We want the community to expand beyond Finland, which is why the user interface has also been translated into English. It is possible to make further localizations and we hope that users around the world will rise to the challenge.

The platform has been developed in co-operation with Otava Folk High School. Role-playing games have been used at the school to supplement to teaching for a number of years and many of the games to first be made available in the game library have been tweaked here and there to suit the particular needs of the institution.

Here’s a brief rundown of the platform as it currently is:

Information

‘Pelilauta’, a webzine focused on role-playing is integrated into the front page. Here, users can read accomplished pieces on role-playing or send their own work for a chance to take part in the making of the webzine.

Community participation and forum

Forge & Illusion has a discussion board where users can freely talk about anything and everything to do with role-playing. It is also a teaching aid. Many of the games available in the game library upon release are educational. We encourage both teachers and students using the games as learning aids to share their experiences with other users. This is why the forum has been integrated into the game library (see below).

Distribution

Forge & Illusion includes a game library, through which anyone can put out an RPG. In the early stages, publication is handled through the service provider. The licensing terms, determined by the game developer, will be set out in the library.

Electronic versions of games will be available free of charge in PDF format. Users may order printed copies at a price set by the license owner.

Events

The second part of the application's name - Illusion refers to a toolkit for organizing games and events.

The tool allows game masters and event organizers to create websites for their events, collect registrations and entry fees from participants (among other things). For those with some programming skills, it also offers a way to customize the event's look and feel to match their event exactly.

History

The Forge & Illusion project began in 2002, when two friends, Antti Leppä and Leevi Heinonen , came up with a plan to create a character sheet tool. Regardless of the plans made, the project never kicked off, but eventually took the form of RPG_GUI, a universal toolkit to help game masters. By 2003, the project had taken the shape of a simple desktop application (see photo).

Even though the plan was to create a fairly versatile toolkit, capable of virtually anything, the end result was little more than a shoddily executed creature generator without (need we say it?) a character sheet creation feature, which is what the project was originally all about.

RPG_GUI was canned and in its place emerged RgGUI, a brand spanking new online version of the toolkit.

Thus, unwittingly, the first steps toward creating Illusion were taken.

Development of RgGUI began in late 2003. The key ideas behind the project had remained the same.

Even with the introduction of the online element, the plan of creating a user-friendly toolkit designed to make gaming easier for players and game masters, instead of, say, an online role-playing game platform remained unchanged.

Nevertheless, moving the project online opened up a world of new possibilities and prospective features, many of which have since been passed on to Illusion, such as creature models, large-scale battles and players’ diaries.

Plans for a character sheet tool never came to fruition due to time constraints.

In 2004, the team behind RgGUI came to the conclusion that the project deserved to be developed further.

However, the prototypal nature of the project had led to much of the programming being below par and the decision was made to start from scratch.

The application was completed, with enough intriguing, albeit ultimately useless features added to it to boggle the minds of even the development team. A character sheet tool was, however, nowhere to be found.

In the autumn of 2005, the team came up with an idea for a tool to aid game developers by making it possible for multiple people to work on the same game and even share the fruits of their labour with a community of like-minded people. Core ideas from earlier projects were included in this new one. The new joint authoring tool was named Forge, while the game master’s toolkit was to be called Illusion.

Around this time, to the relief and great merriment of users and developers alike, the graphically gifted Jari Lankinen joined the team and Forge & Illusion v0.5. saw the light of day.

This early version, however, never made it into production, as the layout was thought to be too grim and gloomy. It was not until v1.0 that the project was first introduced to the wider world and distributed as open source.

Illusion, as well as the character sheet tool, remained in the works.

In 2010, the visuals of the website were spruced up and the layout substantially modernised. The toolkit itself remained largely the same as before.

The post-update toolkit was named v2.0. The first working prototype of a character sheet tool was developed, but it failed to make the cut into production.

In 2013, the next major update was brought out. The visuals were given a complete overhaul and many less popular functions were scrapped altogether.

A significant introduction was that of the game library, through which users can publish their own games, as well as freely download others’ creations. As part of the update, the “Pelilauta” webzine, with its focus on role-playing games, was integrated into the website.

At the end of the year 2014 Illusion finally saw the light of the day. In the first phase the tool focused on event websites.

In the next year, the tool took huge steps forward and in the autumn of 2015 the application actually included (believe or not) a character sheet tool!

Use of cookies

This website uses cookies. Cookies are small text files, automatically saved by the website onto your computer to store information.

The site uses cookies for two purposes:

Saving login details
Monitoring user behaviour through the use of tracking cookies (Google Analytics, UserVoice)

You may opt to block cookies. Please bear in mind that this will cause the application not to function as intended.

On the first login, the site will ask for permission to use tracking cookies. Should the user not consent to this, no information on their use of the site will be passed on.

Open Source

The project is open source, so you may contribute to it, if you wish to do so.

There are a number of ways you can make a contribution:

You can report issues and errors by clicking on the grey question mark in the top right-hand corner and describing the problem in the field provided, attaching a screenshot, if necessary.You can also make suggestions for new features and improvements here.
If you’d like to create a new localization of FnI, or simply refine the language of the interface, follow the instructions on GitHub: https://github.com/foyt/fni/wiki/Contributing.
If you yourself want to implement a change on your own, make use of the following instructions: https://github.com/foyt/fni/wiki/Contributing

Contacting us

If you want to become part of the development team or have any other suggestions or concerns, the best way to get in touch is to drop us a line at development@foyt.fi

Acknowledgements

Our thanks to Antti Leppä, Leevi Heinonen, Jari Lankinen, Samuli Turunen, Anssi Kokkonen and Lauri Heikkinen for their involvement in the project.

We would like to extend a special “thank you” to the Otava Folk High School.