A little over a year ago, in November of 2021, John and I had the opportunity to bring Mote to Orycon in Portland, Oregon, our hometown literary SF convention. It was the realization of a dream two years in the making, made briefly possible in a pre-Omicron world.

At Orycon, we met all different kinds of people who stopped at our booth, took flyers, sat down to play Mote with us and each other on our laptops, even got to know us. We met authors and publishers, dreamers who could talk our ear off telling us about the worlds and stories they and their friends had created together over years, teens with very specific questions, old-timers who regarded us with suspicion (and some who signed up!).

What all these people had in common was that they were very different from the people we’d been able to reach online. While the community we’d been building online skewed heavily toward indie digital and tabletop gaming, the people we met at Orycon were readers and writers, LARPers and SCAdians.

John and I recognized that the core of our product — real-time, collaborative fiction — was compelling to this audience, and a real solution to the challenges they faced building story universes over years with friends across the country. We also realized that many of the features we had built and were building were completely secondary to this core use-case, and because of that, the perfect audience for the core of Mote stories wasn’t able to connect with it.

We realized then we needed to cut the distractions and focus on finishing the foundation of Mote stories. One year later, that vision has finally coalesced into what we think of as Mote 1.0, representing a major shift in how Mote works that we think takes us on a path toward leaving beta.

Collaborative fiction

What does the ideal tool for collaborative fiction creation look well? Well, to start with, the stories you create have to be something you can return to and continue to develop over time. We need to start storing the content of players’ stories, retaining the ability to re-render them as needed, with subsequent play sessions adding to the story over time, and a dedicated reading mode.

Before we can do that, we needed to do away with personas and pets in favor of the more flexible (and persistent) characters, which we added to Mote last summer. The way we render stories needs a rethink, too. We still believe second-person present tense is great for real time play, but most players want to read their stories in less exotic first- or third-person past.

If players are going to be spending time going back and reading their stories, though, they’ll need a way to fix typos, and continuity errors, and even tweak the inferences being made by the narration engine. So ultimately we need collaborative editing, both offline editing, and touch-ups that can be made during play (think rewind on steroids).

Finally, we need a way for players to share what they create on Mote with their friends, whether by allowing stories to be made public, to be able to embed stories in other sites or applications, or by sending stories to Google Docs for further editing and export.

Watch for these changes coming out over the course of 2023.

And more…

There’s a lot more that goes into a non-beta Mote than just a new storytelling experience.

• A redesigned login and signup flow will make it easier than ever for new players to get into Mote and start telling stories. Redesigned player settings UI that’s better organized with room to grow.
• A redesigned library that players can customize to organize and curate stories that are important to them.
• Essential tools for players to control their data, including data deletion and story ownership transfer. Operator tools that enable us to provide player support and mitigate problem behavior.
• A revised privacy policy and terms.

These changes will begin appearing in Mote incrementally, as they’re ready. At some point, John and I will make the call to peel the “beta” label off and kick off a marketing campaign.

By the way, the Mote Discord server is the best way to stay up to date on Mote development, and also a great venue to give us feedback on these changes.