Note: This project is not affiliated with Kinetic games. Fan project only.
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Phasmophobia is an indie ghost hunting video game by Kinetic Games. The game has been in Early Access on Steam for several years as the studio develops the game with heavy community engagement. While Phasmophobia has been very successful so far, the early access nature nearly guarantees changes to the game.
I've been playing this game through several major updates, and while I'm the type of player to keep up with patch notes posted on Steam and in the official Discord channel, the average player is more likely to look for answers in a more user-friendly format like a wiki or walk-through. This means heading to Google for the handy search bar, which algorithmically (i.e., based on SEO) leads to a third-party wiki, article, or video. Frequent updates paired with reliance on unaffiliated, third-party documentation leads to out-of-date information, or misleading guidance based on assumptions and speculation by the user base. This can be frustrating for players—particularly new ones—and potentially drive them away.
Eager to exercise my technical communication education, I decided to create an "official" user-facing knowledge base as a volunteer portfolio project. I did not want to take up the studio's time, so I based my strategy on the following research about the company and its budget and staff availability.
While successful, Kinetic is still an indie studio and the industry can be unstable, so, minimal budget.
Kinetic already employs at least one community manager that oversees their Discord server and Steam forum.
There already appears to be some attempts at guides intended to be displayed in a regular text channel of the Discord server.
Based on some history using Discord's Forum feature in my fraternity, I decided to find a way to make the Forum work as a knowledge base. It is not the the intended purpose of the feature, but the limited search function that accompanies Forum would be more familiar and accessible for users than trying to search through Discords regular text channels.
With these criteria laid out, I made a content hierarchy chart using Lucidchart that outlines the tag and titling process needed to make Forum's search function work effectively. To accompany this chart, I documented the strategy in Google Docs and created a PDF containing my research and rationales, as well as recommendations where there was room for Kinetic to tweak things. The document also contains a step-by-step guide for setting up the Forum within Discord, managing permissions, and then using the hierarchy chart to label content.
Below are samples from the project. Click the image to expand.
