Design and Development of a Creative Role-Playing Forum
Origin story
Eposia was originally meant to be a place for creative people, aimed mainly at horse lovers. The idea came from a community I'd been part of myself: a horse-roleplay forum where members painted horses together, traded horses, and wrote stories. What fascinated me wasn't really the horse theme itself, but the creativity it sparked. People developed their own characters, traded with each other, designed content, and built a living world together.
That's exactly the feeling I wanted to bring back with Eposia, though not just as a pastime. There was a pedagogical idea behind it: designing a forum where creative people could find motivation, inspiration, and a space to practice their own skills, while also connecting with other people.
Technical development
For the implementation I chose WoltLab, after having mostly worked with MyBB up to that point. WoltLab felt more modern and was much more extensible. Working on the project, I got into PHP, community platforms, plugins, permission and role concepts, user profiles, and customization options. Just gaining that experience was already a win for me.
Through exchanges with other players, I kept stumbling onto new ideas: fantasy elements, magic systems, energy and mana systems, custom abilities, ever more complex character development. New ideas from the community are a good thing in principle, I just drew the line too late. Bit by bit, the project had almost nothing to do with the original idea anymore, and the pedagogical core I'd started with slipped out of view.
What remained was mostly inspiration during the most intense phases, plus the experience of seeing what's technically possible, both with and without AI. I kept asking myself: can I build this? Can I develop a plugin? That's exactly where it drifted off to, less concept work, more technical experimentation. That cost a lot of effort and, in the end, is also what caused things to stall. My takeaway: next time, I'll draw scope boundaries earlier and put more project management around it.
Current status
Eposia hasn't been abandoned, but it's been deprioritized. Right after finishing my studies, I simply didn't have the time to keep actively developing it, on top of work and other projects like this portfolio. You can look at the project in its current state, though it's not fully functional or thought through down to the last detail right now.
The core idea, a forum for creative people and their motivation, inspiration, and creativity, still excites me just as much, and I'm planning to pick development back up. From a UX perspective, I'd redesign it then, in particular the onboarding would need to be much easier.