This is a long read so bear with me, this is mainly targeted at other artist and story creators.
How I do things:
As an artist and story writer I have many character, location and item concepts floating around my head on on my hard-drive and also the story elements often loosely associated with them.
I have already tried to organize my ever evolving stories into coherent volumes but I will often decide to swap a character from one to another or abort a project or merge it into another, etc.
In addition I also separate all my artwork by year in my personal digital portfolio on my hard-drive. I have going all the way back to 1995. (I scanned virtually all my work to my computer).
Whenever I make a project I have a part of the design document folder that links to the concept art for that project. All the story, game design document,comic or codex for that project are stored there also depending on what kind of project it is. So what I have been doing is pasting a shortcut to the relevant folders in my art archive to the game design folder in the project folder.
How I would like to do things:
What I desire is a system that all my projects can be stored in as visually appealing databases. I would load a project or create one and then I could import characters, locations, items from my project-universal archive (top-left in picture below).
The characters for example would be categorized by genre then they would break down into other denominations like undead, demon, angel, golem etc… The characters would be displayed in the list with an icon and name, then when clicked on there would be like a card for it that shows the relevant basic information about it, if it’s a common minion, mini-boss or main character, what projects it has been assigned to before, etc. of course all this info could be changed anytime as my work is constantly updated.
The character cards could be assigned to a project and given a role as if casting an actor to a movie. Any information added to the concept is also logged in the codex for the character so I can review what roles it has played in previous projects should I use it again.
I just feel like there could be a much better visually appealing way to organize concepts than folders and files. I think a lot of good ideas are lost sight of by their creators because they failed to organize their ideas in an appealing way before enough time passed that they changed their mood.
This program wouldn’t be for game design documents (I know something like that already exist). It would just be for putting the many drawings of my characters along side the stories about them personally and the stories they are apart of. Also this program is for the creator, not employers, this would be nothing like a professional digital portfolio which is designed to show the best of your work only, this by contrast would house all of your work.
I want to be able to have like a slide show that I click next and it goes to the next slide (like PowerPoint but less tacky looking). It would have the relevant picture and the story text with it and in some other section of the program there would be all the cards associated with this part of the story I could click on and see the full design history of my of the character. e.g. all the 2001 drawings to present and a list of all the projects it has been in, then I can click anything on that past project list and in another section I can read the codex entry for that project.
Concepts would have levels that are automatically leveled up by the program based on how much content for that concept you have updated. This way you can easily see the most refined concepts you have based on level.
Here is an early mock-up (very lacking and ugly) of what I have in mind: (Right click → view image for better view.)
So, what do you think? Does anything like this exist already? Would you find something like this useful? Could this (making this program) work as an open source project?