One of the biggest problems facing world-builders is the sheer quantity of content they need to come up with to build a fictional world. It took JRR Tolkien a lifetime to create the world of Arda, and in today's world that's just too long. Consumer attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, and people need to be kept engaged for you to get a return on your investment.

One of the beautiful things about human society is that if a concept is developed for long enough it can turn from an artform into a science. World-building is no different. There is a science to worl-building, and we think we've cracked the code. If you analyse all the fictional worlds out there in society you notice that they all include the same macro concepts.

Here at Backstory we've developed our unique World Building Engine. We have designed it to be able to create a fictional world with all the elements you would expect to see. We took it a step further and trained our engine to programmatically build a world's history without any inconsistencies. Our engine can build a world as rich and detailed as Tolkien's Arda in less than a week.

With each world we create at Backstory, we handle the macro programmatically. We then recruit creatives into a world's team as builders, to fill in the micro. By shortening the time it takes to build a world down to 1 week, we dramatically increase the chance of that world's success. Quicker turn arounds lead to more opportunities for consumer engagement.

One of the known complications of shared worlds is the possibility for bad continuity between storylines. With different teams of creatives working on different content, set at different times in a world's history, in different parts of the world, things can get confusing. We decided to solve this by having trained creatives who are essentially loremasters.

The builder role in our worlds is unique. Each of our stories has a builder on the team, and they have a very important role to play. It is their job to make sure that the content of the story falls into line with the canon of the world. We've made this as simple as possible by putting together all kinds of human-friendly ways to understand a world's canon once it has been created.

Builders are often the go to people when pitching new content ideas within a world's team. They have intimate knowledge of the world, its history and lore, and will more than likely know where in the world's timeline such a storyline can fit.

There are different ways that a world's management team can organise their builders. Some choose to give different builders different eras of world history within which to work. Others divide the world up by continents or regions and give each to a different builder. There is no right or wrong way to do it, so it's best to see what suits your team. We estimate that each world team should have between 8-10 builders.