Trackside Interview: Matt Adcock@MUDGamers.com/BC-Dev.net

The MUDdy Hobo recently had a chance to ask a bunch of questions of Matt Adcock, whose official site can be found at bc-dev.net. We appreciate him taking the time to answer!

MH: How did you first discover MUDs?

Matt Adcock: I guess I was a relative latecomer to MUDs. I first discovered them around 1998/9 while at university. I don’t remember exactly how I started, possibly through TMC I think. I tried a few games that I don’t really remember much about, but the first MUD I played for any length of time was called Avalon.

MH: You indicated on your website that FMud, your Flash-based MUD client, came about because you weren't happy with existing web-based clients. How popular has FMud become since it became available? What are you happy with? What still needs work?

Matt Adcock: There are several MUDs out there using it and I think it is definitely a good alternative to something like the JTA telnet client. The biggest barrier to entry is the requirement to serve a policy file and that’s what I get the most support queries about. Unfortunately, this is required by the Flash player and the only real workaround is to use a proxy, which is what I did with MudGamers.

I think the client definitely looks nicer than some of the Java ones out there, and the scripting capabilities are pretty advanced for an embedded client. You can also save logs in plain text or HTML and load/save script settings locally which is nice.

The main problems with the client are the telnet and terminal support which are rather limited. It works well enough for the majority of MUDs out there, but ideally I’d like it to be more compliant. Background colours are probably the most glaring omission right now.

MH: How did your RPG project, Maiden Desmodus, come about?

Matt Adcock: About a year ago, I was looking to get involved in a MUD project and responded to an ad on TMC from Wade Gustafson who was looking for a partner to work with on a new project. Wade is an excellent writer and a very creative guy and he had several game themes that he’d fleshed out and between us we settled on Maiden Desmodus.

Wade does all the writing and the overall world theme and story, while I do the programming and design the game systems and mechanics. There is some crossover of course and we frequently bounce ideas off each other, but generally we work really well together within our own areas.

MH: What's the current status of Maiden Desmodus?

Matt Adcock: The original plan was to open Q1 of 2009 but as is often the way that has slipped a bit, but we hope to open soon. Certainly it’ll be a matter of weeks rather than months.

We began last summer and while it doesn’t feel like nearly a year I’m pleased with how much we have done in that time. As of today we have 1069 rooms, 373 objects, 171 mobiles and 297 scripts – all unique prototypes. We also have around 20,000 more lines of code than when we started.

I made the decision right away to use Nakedmud as a base to build on and I think it definitely gave us a head start compared to coding from scratch. It was a bit of a risk as at the time there were no operational MUDs using the codebase, but I liked the design and it was actively maintained which is a huge benefit.

MH: How are you approaching theme development on Maiden Desmodus? Are you providing a detailed history for players to build from or do you focus more on broader strokes while players fill in more of the details as time goes by?

Matt Adcock: There is definitely a distinct theme and world history to Maiden Desmodus. This is based around a faction conflict between two warring Kingdoms, as well as the mysterious figure of the Maiden Desmodus herself. I guess the setting would best be described as medieval low magic fantasy with a dark horror feel. It’s pretty gritty and brutal and I think it’s a nice change of pace from the more common gothic type of horror you often see in MUDs.

What we’re working on right now is putting in a long quest line which will introduce new players to the game world, history and the ongoing faction conflict. Each faction has a line of 20 quests each so hopefully these will really help to engage players with the setting.

Wade wrote a full-length novel based around another game theme he developed, so he is pretty detail-oriented and it’s fair to say he knows the setting of Maiden Desmodus inside and out. Unfortunately I spend too much time in the code and can’t even find my way around the world half the time, which is a little embarrassing I suppose. Although having designed the combat system I can PK him really easily :)

MH: How did the MUDGamers site come about?

Matt Adcock: It was something of a Sunday afternoon thing that I did after being frustrated trying to navigate TMC. I thought it would be so much cooler if MUD portal sites were more like modern web game sites such as Kongregate. Presenting games clearly and providing players with plenty of tools to sort and find games they are interested in playing, combined with a ‘click to play’ interface just seemed like a really good idea. This is even more important when you are trying to attract new players from outside the established MUD community.

I never really intended MudGamers to seriously compete with the likes of TMC and TMS, it was more of a ‘call to action’ for those sites to show them that MUDs can be presented in a more modern, appealing and accessible way. That said however, traffic is increasing and we just hit 75 games listed on the site so I am really pleased with how it’s working out.

MH: On your site, you state that you're working on a client for Iron Realms Entertainment. What's the status of that project? How did it come about?

Matt Adcock: The project is mostly complete now and the client has been used by IRE on several Flash gaming sites as well as on their main portal site. Back when I was first developing FMud I had heard that IRE were looking at doing a Flash based client so I got in touch and we went from there. Jeremy at IRE has been great to work with and it was a lot of fun working with him and their design guy to knock the client into shape. It was also a good learning opportunity for me as FMud was actually my first project using Adobe Flex.

MH: How optimistic are you about the future of text-based games? Why?

Matt Adcock: I am definitely optimistic and believe that MUDs have the potential to grow. Text games will always have a niche appeal, but with more and more people getting into online games there has to be a new audience out there for MUDs. Even my mother in law enjoys playing web games in her spare time.

Taking IRE as an example, if you look at the comments on their Kongregate entry there are plenty of “wtf text suxors” comments, but equally there are quite a few from players who’d never played a text game before and really enjoyed it. We need to find better ways of reaching these gamers.

Again this goes back to the reasoning behind MudGamers, I imagined someone coming from a MMORPG or web gaming background landing on TMC and just not knowing where to start. We need to say really clearly to people “these are the games, click here to play them”.

MH: What's the most important lesson MUD developers can learn from graphical MMORPGs?

Matt Adcock: The single biggest lesson is accessibility, no doubt about it. By this I mean ease with which a new player can get into your game. If you look at modern MMORPGs like WoW, WAR, AoC etc, character creation is simple, there are no separate tutorials to complete, no manuals to read, and new players are directed where to go and what to do as soon as they enter the game world.

Too often in MUDs I see a detailed character creation process where the player is forced to make character choices without knowing the consequences of those choices. This is often followed by some kind of “MUD school” that is completely removed from the rest of the game, often accompanied by lists of help files to read and remember. Couple this with some pretty arcane syntax and many games can be quite intimidating to players unfamiliar with MUDs.

Whatever the focus of your game, whether it is hack and slash, PvP, role-playing or whatever, the key is to get new players involved in that right from the start. You need to draw them in from the moment they log in, not tell them to go spend an hour reading help files or wandering around a phoney MUD school.

MH: How valuable are social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook for MUDs? Why?

Matt Adcock: Social networking is a great way to reach people who may share a common interest with you, so in that sense sites like Facebook could be used by MUDs as a marketing tool. I know FMud can be embedded on Facebook, MySpace or as a Google widget for example.

I think there are one or two MUDs that use Twitter for broadcasting game information and events in real time, and certainly if more people talk about MUDs whether on regular blogs or on services like Twitter it can only help MUDs as a whole. I personally use both Facebook and Twitter (@bcdev), although not specifically to publicise my MUD projects.

MH: Have you built a career around your projects or are they something you do in spare time? What do you do for a living?

Matt Adcock: I do have some commercial MUD projects, but I think it’d be something of a stretch to say I make a living from them! I have a wonderful day job taking care of my daughter and also work freelance as a web developer.

MH: What MUD-focused sites do you follow? Why?

Matt Adcock: I follow TMC, TMS and Mudbytes, although I am not a very frequent contributor to any of them. I also read quite a few blogs and other gaming sites such as Massively and Gamasutra. I do enjoy keeping up with what’s going on in the MUD and wider MMORPG community, although the signal to noise ratio can be pretty low a lot of the time.

MH: Are current MUD-focused sites missing something? What can they do to make themselves more relevant and viable?

Matt Adcock: As I’ve said before, I’d love to see a MUD community portal site that looked and functioned a lot more like a site such as Kongregate. A modern look with simplified navigation is important to attract and retain new visitors, and a way to play the listed games without having to download a dedicated client is really essential.

It’s not just about cosmetic changes however. I also think there needs to be a fundamental shift in thinking by those of us who run MUDs. Traditionally there has been a lot of competition for players between MUDs but I believe this only harms the community in the long run. We all have our favourite few MUDs, but these often change over time as we discover new games or revisit old ones. I’d like to see portal sites that bring MUDs and their individual player bases together, where I can try out a variety of MUDs and hopefully find several that I can enjoy playing. Once you add in cross game features like chat and rankings you can really start to build a sense of community between games, rather than the site simply being a place to list in order to attract players to your own game.

MUDs are definitely a niche market, yet they can offer players a wide range of unique gameplay experiences. It’s vital that we, as MUDs, present what we’re about in the best possible way. I have the greatest respect for the existing MUD community sites and I think they do a great job, however I believe there are better ways to present MUDs, particularly to those who may never have played one before.

MH: One opportunity presented by MUDGamers.com is the sense of multiple projects available at a click through a single platform. Where do you see that going in the coming years?

Matt Adcock: Personally I’d love to take the MudGamers concept of “click to play” and apply it to a smaller selection of high quality games with cross game features like chat, achievement ladders and badges, all combined with a common account and micro transaction system. Something similar to what Skotos do I guess, but with a free to play model and more cross game features. This way you can build a community around a collection of games with the goal of sharing players rather than competing for them. You could also add in some simple Flash games that complement the MUDs, such as MUD themed mini games or even link them to the MUDs directly. One of the ideas I’ve got for Maiden Desmodus is to take the mass warfare system I’m working on out of the MUD completely and into a simple graphical strategy game on the website where the outcome of battles would be reflected in the MUD.

MH: What books are you reading these days? Got any movies, music, and games to recommend?

Matt Adcock: It’s terrible but I haven’t read a novel in ages. I’m reading Ted Castranova’s Synthetic Worlds right now which already feels a little dated but is a fascinating read none the less. I’m a big Steven Erikson fan and I think he has a new one out this Summer, but it’s frustrating waiting for the next novel as you invariably forget half of what’s happened before. I’ve also been following George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire but I’ve no idea when his next one is out, he seems to have been writing it for years now. My wife loved the new Star Trek but I fell asleep before the end so not sure I can really recommend it!

As far as gaming goes I don’t have as much time as I’d like and haven’t had the Xbox on for a couple weeks now. I tried Age of Conan recently but couldn’t really get into it so I am getting my MMORPG fix from Warhammer these days. It’s frustrating as I want to really like it, but it always somehow disappoints. It’s wonderfully accessible and I love how you can jump into PvP through scenarios or realm conflict almost immediately. The way the realm conflict is scaled in particular is great design but in practice there’s something missing. I almost wonder if it’s just too easy; you can jump in and out of PvP as you like, there’s no death penalty and with the open party system no need to find a group. It’s almost like there are no incentives not to suck, and with a game that forces team play to such a degree, being surrounded by mediocre players is no fun at all. If things get much worse I may have to turn to Darkfall. But I digress. I don’t really play any MUDs at the moment as I am too focused on Maiden Desmodus.

MH: Are you most passionate about the programming elements or the creative facets of your projects? More about nuts and bolts than the shiny? Why?

Matt Adcock: I like to think that programming is creative, at least it is the way I do it! I guess you’d say I love the nuts and bolts, the mechanics and the systems behind the design. The “how and the why” of games has always appealed to me, even as a player.

MH: Are text-based games that don't offer some form of web-based interface effectively doomed to perpetually tiny playerbases? How can they reach beyond the niche audience otherwise?

Matt Adcock: I don’t know about doomed, but they are certainly limiting their appeal if they don’t offer a web interface. There are plenty of options around in either Flash or Java, and I’ve even seen a few HTML implementations, so it should be relatively simple for any game to setup. They could even list on MudGamers and redirect from their own website direct to the client page if they wanted.

MH: You've blogged about the need for more commercialized MUDs. Has there been any blowback from this from people who condemn the monetization of text-based games? Why is it important to see more commercialized games?

Matt Adcock: I haven’t had any negative feedback on that actually, although there are definitely a few people in the MUD community who think commercial games are taboo. I don’t think it’s a particularly credible position given that MUDs have been commercial for at least as long as they’ve been free, and certainly before free codebases like DIKU and LP.

The main reason I’d like to see more commercial projects is I believe that this would raise the general profile of text games and help to attract more players to all MUDs. More revenue for MUDs means they can spend more on advertising, particularly outside the established MUD community. Developing new portal and community sites with the kinds of features I’ve mentioned would also cost money.

MH: What's the most important thing a MUD developer needs to consider before embarking on their own project?

Matt Adcock: I think you really need to be clear what your motivations are and what you hope to achieve. If you just want to learn programming that’s great, but if you want to produce a game try not to get too bogged down in the technical details. I suppose at this point I should make the customary appeal for people to join an existing project rather than start their own, but nobody who wants to run their own MUD wants to hear that :)

The single most important thing is to make sure you finish what you start.

MH: Where do you see MUDs going as a medium in the next few years? Five? Ten? Are they still around? What niche are they filling?

Matt Adcock: I’d like to see MUD portal sites incorporating some of the features I’ve advocated, and I definitely think we’ll see more web based clients in the future, particularly with custom features like maps, stat bars etc. I also think we’ll see more games merging, at least in terms of marketing, so rather than all trying to attract players to their own websites they can come under one site with a common interface.

While lacking the shinies of big graphical MMORPGs, MUDs can still fill an important niche for several years yet. Given that they are so much cheaper to develop and operate MUDs are able to cater to minority gaming interests in ways that graphical MMORPGs simply cannot. Features such as enforced role-play or permadeath, obscure historical settings and frequent administration run events just aren’t commercially viable for many graphical MMORPGs.

Graphical games will eventually catch up and we’re already seeing this for example with the Hero Engine which uses similar content creation tools to those that MUDs have had for years (not surprising given that it’s from Simutronics). I’m sure these types of tools will find their way to the masses one day, and then we’ll be inundated with hobbyist graphical MMORPGs, DIKU style. Art is still a huge barrier but maybe in the future procedural generation will become more viable and creating content for a graphical game will be on a par with that for a text game.

There will always be some players who just prefer text over graphics of course, but once graphical games are as cheap and easy to produce then we may well see the end of MUDs. I think that day is still a long way off though.

Trackside Interview: Aristotle@Threshold

We recently had the opportunity to ask a bunch of questions of Aristotle, lead developer over at Threshold, about his text-based online roleplaying game.

MH: How did you get involved in MUDs?

Aristotle: I played MUD-like BBS games in college, and a friend on my favorite BBS said to me one day "hey, you should try these games on the internet called MUDs." I took him up on the offer, and my life was irrevocably altered (for the better!).

MH: What's the origin story behind Threshold? What led to it opening in 1996?

Aristotle: The OOC origin story? Well, I had given up on MUDs due to having a bunch of my code stolen a few years earlier. But one summer I was clerking for a law firm, not really liking it, and needed something "fun" to do. So I decided I'd take another crack at making a MUD, but this time I would do it solo so my code couldn't be stolen. That was how Threshold came to be.

The IC origin story is something you need to play Threshold to discover.

MH: How has the playerbase changed since the advent of graphical MMORPGs?

Aristotle: I think Threshold's playerbase has become a little older and more mature since the advent of graphical MMORPGs. While we definitely suffered an overall usage hit for a few years, the long term net effect has been very positive on our community. We lose a lot of the "l2play n00b" types to the graphical MMOs, and frankly they can keep them.

MH: Have you added features to Threshold that were meant to directly compete with MMORPGs?

Aristotle: Not really, no. We get a lot of good ideas from playing graphical MMOs, but I do not think we have ever added a feature specifically to compete with MMORPGs. The closest thing to that would be the simple fact that we always try to be mindful of the accessibility factor that MUDs have going for them. The main reason we do not have a custom client that we REQUIRE is because we want to keep Threshold (and MUDs in general) as widely accessible as possible.

MH: What makes Threshold stand out from the many other MUDs available for people to play?

Aristotle: There are three main things that make Threshold standout: 1) Is is the only RP required (and enforced) commercial game on the internet. 2) It has an absolutely wonderful community. I think the fact that our playerbase is about 50% female is a huge factor there. It helps our community stay balanced and diverse. 3) A fanatical devotion to quality. We could churn out content a lot faster if we really wanted to, but we want everything we add to the game to be top notch in quality. A corollary to this is the fact that we care very deeply about our players. We talk to them on an almost daily basis and are always open to player feedback.

MH: How do you classify Threshold: Hobbyist or commercial? Is it what you do for a living?

Aristotle: Threshold is definitely a commercial game. It is part of our company, Frogdice, and it is my full time job (as well as my wife's full time job).

MH: What do players get in exchange for making real money contributions to Threshold?

Aristotle: I should mention first that almost everything you can receive with real money can also be obtained through regular gameplay. With that said, the main things players receive are convenience options (like quick transport back to their house), in game coin, extra gear storage, and a wide variety of customization options (for their character, their house, etc.).

MH: The game is touted as the oldest RP-enforced MUDs around. How is RP enforced? Where can we check out logs of RP activities from Threshold?

Aristotle: RP is enforced largely by the community itself. New players are immediately offered help by in game advisors, and the RP requirement is made very clear. If players run afoul of it, other players try to take them aside and explain the RP requirement. If they continue to be a problem, they are reported to the admins who take over from there. It is extremely rare that admins have to get involved. It is even rarer that someone refuses to stay IC and roleplay. By making this rule very clear during creation we avoid problems before they start.

MH: What has been the brightest moment for you and your playerbase on Threshold?

Aristotle: This is an easy one. I met my wife through Threshold. For the playerbase, I think the brightest moment was when we switched to free to play. Doing that meant people never had to worry about losing a friend because they wanted to play less and could not justify a recurring fee.

MH: What has been the darkest moment for you and your playerbase?

Aristotle: I think the darkest moment for me was riding out the initial effects of the big graphical MMOs on the MUD genre. That was probably the darkest moment for our players as well. Fortunately, we played to our strengths and have been able to recover and grow quite nicely in the last 3-4 years.

MH: Threshold is an original theme, but are there any fantasy books that you'd recommend for familiarizing oneself with the tone of the game?

Aristotle: Dragonlance is an excellent series for experiencing a classic fantasy world. Threshold is a little more high fantasy than Dragonlance. David Eddings' various series would be good as well (for the traditional good vs. evil conflict), but again Threshold is more high-fantasy, high-magic.

MH: Where do most of Threshold's players hail from?

Aristotle: Threshold has players from over 50 countries. The USA, Canada, Britain, and Australia are certainly the most common due to the language issue. But it amazes me where some of our players come from. I find it particularly interesting that we have players from Israel and Iran, and have benefited from their perspective on our OOC game forums.

MH: What's the most beneficial advertising for Threshold? Paid ads or word-of-mouth?

Aristotle: Word of mouth is without a doubt the most beneficial and effective form of advertising for Threshold.

MH: What does the future hold for text-based online gaming? How will Threshold and other games like it continue to sustain themselves? Where are the new audiences to be found?

Aristotle: I hosted a roundtable discussion on this topic at the most recent IMGDC (Independent MMO Game Developers Conference). I think text games will continue to be viable and even grow as they provide a unique type of gameplay. Text games still do communication and interaction better than graphical games, largely because you are always at the chat interface. You do not have to click in a box and hit enter just to BEGIN speaking with people.

New audiences are to be found from graphical MMOs in my opinion. As graphical MMOs continue to deliver the same pure hack-n-slash gameplay, text games will be able to attract people to their deeper gameplay. Text games really should work together to get the word out on graphical MMO fan sites and forums.

MH: What are you reading lately? Favorite TV shows? Music? Movies? Computer games?

Aristotle: About half of what I read is sci-fi/fantasy, a quarter is non-fiction, and another quarter is modern thriller/drama/mystery type stuff. My absolute favorite TV show right now is Bones, but House is a close second. I rarely get to see movies (since we have two young kids), but I really want to see the new Star Trek movie, the Wolverine movie, the new Terminator movie, and Angels & Demons.

I play a lot of computer games, but right now I am pretty desperate for a good one. The last computer game I played that I really liked was The Witcher. I try to play just about every MMO out there for at least a month or two. I feel game developers really need to make an effort to play other games so they know what else is being done in the market.

MH: What can people expect from Threshold in the next year? Five years?

Aristotle: People can expect lots of interesting story and plot lines (as we continue to tell the story of Threshold's world, and let players shape it), new lands to explore, and some pretty advanced new systems that will add even more variety to Threshold's gameplay. We have a few systems currently in development that are things people have wanted for years. We added a new developer a little over a year ago and he has been a huge boon to Threshold. We have really hit our stride working together and it is paying awesome dividends for Threshold and its players.

HSpace needs help!

HSpace is still on the road to making a return to the MUSH scene, but has suffered some recent setbacks.

Revian, the chief developer working on HSpace 5.0, is currently looking for someone to help staff the test MUSH – add new ship classes and other features to keep people coming back to check out what's new and shiny. He's also looking for a player relations assistant to help visitors make their way around the testbed and learn more about HSpace. And, finally, he needs someone with graphic design expertise to work on the HSpace standalone client interface. (No programming knowledge needed, just a knack for making things look pretty and efficient.)

Interested in any of these positions? Send email to Revian at revian@hspace.org or log in to the test MUSH at telnet://mindgames-studio.com 4201

Threshold represents at IMGDC!

Turns out, the folks from Threshold are making an appearance on behalf of our text-based gaming habit at the Independent MMO conference in Las Vegas! Wish 'em luck letting them know we're not dead!

Here's to hoping that, for once, what happens in Vegas goes all over the damned place.

Dear fellow travelers...

The MUDdy Hobo owes everyone a huge apology for falling off the tracks for the last few weeks. It's been a frantic time, what with the work deadlines and up-and-moving shuffle from an apartment to the new house.

However, the move is more or less complete, a major work deadline is behind me now, and I can spend a bit of time riding the rails again.

The next stop: Threshold!

Love writing lore?

It's not much to do with MUDs, but the MUDdy Hobo will try to drop a useful tidbit about other things here and there:

Blizzard, the folks behind World of Warcraft, are holding a writing contest. If you're interested in learning more, visit this link.

Good luck!

Trackside Interview: Revian@HSpace 5.0

For those who remember the old-school MUSH space engine known as HSpace, which had its origins on Hemlock MUSH, there's good news: A new incarnation of the project is underway at hspace.org

Revian, one of the main developers working on HSpace 5.0, took some time to answer a few questions from the MUDdy Hobo:

MH: HSpace used to be THE top-of-the-line RP MUSH space engine - so what happened to it?

Revian: It went through the hands of several coders, initially HSpace 4 was done by Gepht. When he didn't have the time anymore I took it over and developed it into 4.2, from there it was developed on my several developers, most notably Mark Hassman, who, assisted by Gepht I believe, did some work on it. This lead to the 'trueline' branch, which eventually died off as the people working on it didn't have the time anymore to work on it.

MH: How did the new resurgence come about? What drove the revival to create HSpace 5.0?

Revian: Well, I was away from the community for a bit as I settled into my real life and didn't really have the time to work on anything. Now that my life calmed down a bit I felt I should have a look how HSpace was doing. When I discovered the state it was in I decided it was time to do something back for the community where I learned many of the skills I now use in my life on a day-to-day basis. And I decided I should contribute something back, developing a new, better version of HSpace seemed like the right thing to do. Since Mongo(Shawn Sagady) had been working on a revival attempt for HS 4, I decided to contact him, he immediately responded with great enthousiasm. Because of my greater programming experience I took the programming lead role, while Shawn does more of the design side, since that's where his skill vastly surpass my own.

MH: What do you consider to be the most promising features in the works for HSpace 5.0?

Revian: It's hard to say, but I'm very excited about the modular system design, which should allow players huge flexibility in configuring and tweaking their own ships. We also have the new pseudo-Newtonian physics system, which should allow a whole new level of ship control during ship to ship combat. Additionally I'm very glad with the somewhat integrated economy, which will allow cargo mass affecting ship maneuverability. And also harvesting of resources in space. Finally, I hope that the integrated autopilot will make the system much more easy to use and attractive to the community's none-code-heavy players.

MH: The old HSpace had some mods that allowed the engine to be used on games that weren't necessarily space-oriented but did have vehicles, such as aircraft, boats, and submarines. How much support will HSpace 5.0 have for that kind of functionality?

Revian: Initially we do not plan to support that, simply because it is not our main target. We will focus on supporting space very well, as I honestly believe it's better for us to do one thing well than a lot of things and features mediocre. As a development team we're always moving though and the future might very well offer such functionality.

MH: How are you approaching HSpace development to make it more RP-friendly?

Revian: Well, first of all we've already received a lot of great suggestions from the community. We will be integrating better automation systems meaning on regular patrols more time can be spent roleplaying, and less to monitor every single gauche on the vessel. Also we will allow for more types of ship to ship (and bridge to bridge) communication. Finally we'll try and make the messages aboard the ship give more 'feel' to the vessel, we are examining the possibilities of windows in ship rooms for example that offer players in those rooms a view of space. We are not sure how much of that we can get into the first release though.

MH: What's the biggest challenge facing HSpace 5.0?

Revian: Well, asides from the things that will be challenging and we have control over, which is making it a true contribution to existing MUSHes and there system. A challenge we have less influence over lies in bringing it to the people and getting it to be used (and improved through feedback, suggestions and patches!) by the community.

MH: When are you aiming to release HSpace 5.0 for public consumption?

Revian: Currently we believe summer 2009 is a feasible time to have a fully functional initial release. That does not mean that it will contain all features requested, since we will continue to improve and develop it past that point. But it will provide all functionality needed to run a solid roleplaying (or social) environment on.

MH: Can HSpace 5.0 be used for platforms beyond PennMUSH? If not, are there any plans to eventually try to create mods that work with other platforms?

Revian: We will not be providing that functionality from the current development team, however we did take great care to make sure integration on other platforms is as easy as possible. For those technical amongst us, there are two files to be implemented, all functions from HSIface.h need to be implemented in a CPP file, and all hooks in HSIfacePennHooks.cpp will have to be duplicated for that platform. Internally HSpace uses no code that depends on Penn.

MH: What's your background with HSpace? With other coding projects?

Revian: I am a long time roleplayer(although time has not permitted me to roleplay for quite a while), I have experienced HSpace on several MUSHes, and also tried to develop a couple MUSHes using it, but never quite succeeded. In my daily life I'm a Software Engineer for a internet media company and I have experience with many open source packages (for example Mozilla, VLC, Qt), and have contributed to some.

MH: What inspirations colored the development of HSpace 5.0? (In the past, we've talked about how physics in 5.0 will let you mimic the spin-around-under-velocity-and-shoot maneuver from Babylon 5, for example.)

Revian: Well, I've always loved Sci-Fi, Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica will most definitely have colored the development. Of course Star Trek, even though we will not Trek-orient the space system, and related technobabble will most definitely have had an influence. Last the people working on it and playing with it have inspired us, Shawn has contributed some great ideas and beaten some stupid ones out of me.

MH: What's been the biggest headache in trying to get HSpace 5.0 off the ground?

Revian: Getting people to take it seriously, thanks for helping with that!

MH: Developing a space system for a niche MUD population - a niche within a niche within a niche - seems like it might be a real boulder-up-the-hill sort of task. Why do it? Do you worry that you're investing a lot of time and energy in a system that might not get many eyes on it?

Revian: My personal ambition is mainly to learn, both in coding and in human relations it is a great learning experience to work on such a project. Although my real life job provides me with plenty of experiences and completely different learning experiences, it is within a strict corporate environment. This project gives me a chance to educate myself outside of that environment in different directions.

MH: Are there other similar applications you'd like to see developed for MUSHes?

Revian: I can't think of anything at the moment to be honest. I would love to eventually develop graphical extensions which would maintain the richness of text-based roleplaying but truly augment to the experience of the users environment.

Thanks to Revian for taking the time! And, if you're of a mind to check out the new HSpace, be sure to visit their testbed MUSH at the following telnet address: mindgames-studio.com 4201.

iMUD

I gave this iPhone application a try while I was stuck in traffic between D.C. and Baltimore last week. A grungy old hobo can dare to dream that he can get access to cool text-based games from anywhere on the 3G network, right?

Well, the good news about iMUD is that it works. You CAN connect to a MU* from anywhere. YAY! But that's where the good news ends. The game window is just too tiny for old eyes to read. And even if you could read the tiny text, there's really no way to do much roleplaying.

Sad. Not worth the money!

MUDdy Sidetracking

The MUDdy Hobo is off on a trip to Baltimore for the next couple of days. When I get back, I'll check out Threshold MUD. Stay tuned!

Trackside Interview: Lasher@Aardwolf

The MUDdy Hobo got a chance to barrage Lasher@Aardwolf with a heaping list of questions. And, whaddya know: He came back with a feast of answers!

Enjoy!

***

MH: How did Aardwolf come about? Had you played other games before developing your own? What lessons did you learn and then apply to Aardwolf?

Lasher: I played my first LPMud in 1993, it was the original “Valhalla” MUD and I found it via a games link on “gopher.” Amazing how much the internet has changed since then.

Anyway, it was down for a month so I went checking out some other MUDs and found a small ROM mud called “Aardvark.” It was a completely different style and didn’t have the depth of Valhalla, but was fun in a different way. After playing that MUD for a while I talked to the owner of it about doing some coding for them, and became an admin.

I’d never actually planned to run a MUD. If I had sat down one day with a plan to start one and thought about what I wanted to do I’m sure it would have been quite different.

How Aardwolf came about is basically that “Aardvark” was hosted on a University site in the Netherlands and became very unstable. After about a month of constantly being up and down, I moved the mud off-site expecting it to go down one day and never come back up. That is exactly what happened a couple of weeks later so we decided to rename the MUD (leaving open the option for the original to come back up) which is how the name became “Aardwolf,” really just to having something similar to Aardvark. I’ve seen many comments over the years that “Aardwolf” was a play to be listed high in alphabetical lists, but really was never a consideration, although it might have been why the original Aardvark was named so.

So, many of the design decisions you go through when opening a MUD never happened on Aardwolf, we just took what was there and worked on improving it. In terms of lessons learned outside of the MUD world then applied to Aardwolf, really, none. I had about 10 years experience as a software developer, so was used to considering ideas, weighing priorities etc, but in terms of running an online community it was trial by fire. The basic premise was “create the game I’d want to play.”

MH: How many active player accounts are there? How many are online at your peak hours?

Lasher: Active I would define as “logged in in the last 30 days” and I honestly don’t know. There are just over 36,000 pfiles in the game right now, but all that means is they have logged in within the last couple of years.

Numbers peak at just over 400 in the week and get up to 450 on the weekends. Our busiest period was probably 2004-2005 where we’d average around 500 in the evenings.

You can actually see stats by the hour over the last 24 hours by typing ‘online’ in the game and see can average over the last year per day by typing ‘online 2’. You can also see who is online at any given time at http://www.aardwolf.com/aardweb/livewho.php

MH: What steps did you take to build awareness about Aardwolf in its earliest days?

Lasher: Really, none. We didn’t advertise anywhere. We had a listing on TMC and that was it. The best form of advertising for MUDs always has been word of mouth, and probably always will be. When the mud moved and become “Aardwolf” it averaged around 10-15 people online and just grew from there.

MH: How has your playerbase been affected, if at all, by the advent of popular MMORPGs?

Lasher: Definitely, I think most MUDs have. Our average is down around 100 over the past few years and mostly it is due to people leaving for games such as World of Warcraft. You also have the dynamics of a generally older player base leaving for a variety of reasons such as marriage, career, etc. This has always happened but you always had an influx of newer younger players to replace them – I think that’s where we all struggle now, getting younger potential players to give a text-based game a chance.

MH: Have you added features to Aardwolf specifically to compete with MMOs?

Lasher: We haven’t added features to specifically compete with MMOs, but we’ve learned from them and added some features to make the game more accessible.

For example, 10 years ago it was very rare for MUDs to publish maps other than world maps. The “average” MUD player was quite comfortable finding a client, finding scripts and plugins for it, customizing their scripts to meet their needs and tweaking it all to work just right. Most game players today don’t have patience for that, they are used to clients that are made specifically for the game they are playing and everything just works.

We have built some things into the game itself such as speedwalking to areas and “spellup” scripts. Having a built-in speedwalk command (you can “runto [area name]”) would have been unheard of 10 years ago, but we added it, the users love it, new players aren’t frustrated trying to find areas and we feel like we don’t lose much because there’s enough to explore and enough puzzles to solve within the areas without making finding them itself a challenge.

MH: What do you feel sets Aardwolf apart from hundreds of other text-based games?

Lasher: I wish I knew. Whenever you see a MUD post an ad there’s certain things you always see, almost to the point that they’re cliches. Such as “We listen to player ideas,” “We apply the rules fairly.” Obviously we strive to do the same. Any kind of admin abuse is absolutely not tolerated and I think over time, the players see that. Most of our best ideas came from players and our job is to integrate them in a way that is fun and adds something to the game. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve always taken the basic premise of “create the game I’d want to play” and, over time, we seem to have attracted a good number of people who seem to have the same tastes.

Beyond that, I don’t know why Aardwolf grew so much. For a very long time it was just your average ROM mud. We weren’t featured highly in any voting charts and didn’t even list on TMS until 2003 when we were already close to our peak, so it wasn’t that either. Having a big enough player base to vote us up today definitely helps with exposure, but how and why we grew that player base in the first place is still a mystery to me.

MH: Aardwolf features familiar MUD aspects like hack-and-slash monster killing and quests. What gives Aardwolf depth? What makes players keep coming back?

Lasher: Aardwolf is definitely a hack and slash mud. It has very little roleplay (some clans do a very good job of roleplaying internally, but that’s it) and doesn’t even have a good overall plot / story.

I think if Aardwolf proves anything it is that hack and slash does not have to mean “lacks depth.” While the game is based on leveling there are many side games and things for people to do. The Lua scripting system has been excellent for us and since implementing that, it is probably the first time I have ever not regretted starting out with LP on day one.

Some of the quests (“goals”) in areas are extremely deep and affect how areas will interact with you for the rest of the life of your character (which, btw, is forever, we never have and never will pwipe). There’s also little touches most people will never even notice, but those that do notice enjoy them. For example, when you kill something, the description of the corpse is unique for pretty much every ability that can kill something. That “feature” itself isn’t particularly exciting, but there’s hundreds of little touches like that through the game.

MH: The Academy provides an automated comprehensive introduction to the game. How long has it existed? Does it take the place of seat-of-the-pants newbie helping? How has it been received, in general, by new players?

Lasher: The academy is getting close to a year old now – it was actually the original reason the goal system was written, to track progress through the academy. While working on that I started to think “we could really use this everywhere” so it became more of a generic questing system. The academy itself is almost 10,000 lines of Lua code.

In general it has been very well received, some people feel it may be too long (and it probably is), but there’s a lot to cover and people can leave/return at any time. They can also entirely skip lessons and just review the notes.

I think in a future version of the academy we’ll add more “actions” early on the academy to break it up further. It absolutely doesn’t replace the regular “newbie helping” and there is still a very active “helper” team available to help new players get familiar with Aardwolf. However, if someone asks a series of questions that are all answered in the academy they will be encouraged to go through it.

MH: What prompted the implementation of a "speedwalking" system?

Lasher: We touched on this a little earlier, but Aardwolf is now close to 40,000 rooms almost all unique. None of these are auto-generated. One of the things people enjoyed with the old ROM mud was familiarity – they knew where a good portion of the areas were immediately. So, this is one reason.

The main reason was that we’re re-organizing some of the world and every time we changed something people would be frustrated because the speedwalk scripts they had acquired from wherever stopped working. It basically came down to “If these speedwalk scripts are going to be available to everyone anyway, they might as well be accurate and up to date” so we built them into the game. The continents are 10,000 rooms in total and most areas are linked to the continents – making people search within that to find areas really isn’t a fun experience. Not all areas can be speedwalked to within the game – some of them are harder to find and they are excluded.

I think it turned out to be a good compromise overall. Some of the quests and player competitions involve getting to an area as quickly as possible, before others get there. The built-in speedwalks will get you there but if people take the time to build their own they will get there faster. The built-in speedwalks have to be “lowest common denominator” and can’t take shortcuts through clan portals, higher level areas, etc that players can build for themselves.

MH: What games besides Aardwolf have you been playing lately?

Lasher: I don’t get much time to play games lately, which is unfortunate. I haven’t played another MUD or MMO in years – what little free time I have I like to work on the MUD itself. I actually have Bioshock from Christmas two years ago,4 unopened. This Christmas I got Fallout 3 and Gears of War 2 – maybe I’ll even play them one day. The only game I really play is Guitar Hero, because I can pick it up, play for a few minutes, and put it down. I fear if I start something like Fallout 3 I’ll disappear completely for 3 months.

MH: Got any favorite books? Movies? Television shows?

Lasher: Books, I usually read what you’d expect from a MUD player – Sci-fi/Fantasy and programming manuals. My favorite author is Orson Scott Card. I made a point of reading something out of style recently and read Pillars of Earth by Ken Follett, very interesting book set in Medieval times. Movies, hmm, I have a hard time watching any movie more than once – when I already know how they end it’s less interesting, so there’s really no movies I watch over and over. Some of my favorites from the last few years are Gladiator, Vanilla Sky, Dark Knight, Natural Born Killers, Black Hawk Down. The only TV shows I watch are Heroes and Lost. Our TV is rarely on other than the Nickelodeon stuff my daughter has on. The last series I watched before that was Jericho, which turned out very disappointing the way it was cut short and finished in a hurry.

You didn’t ask about music. My musical tastes are all over the place but with a strong lean towards alternative, maybe even “emo”. Long term some of my favorite groups are Pink Floyd (including the Roger Waters solo stuff), U2, Iron Maiden and Nirvana. Some of the more recent groups are Blue October, Ludo, Toxic Airborne Event, Avenged Sevenfold, Muse and System of a Down.

MH: How much of the creative work - room descriptions, monster emotes, tutorial text - is your doing? Do you have a large admin team helping you?

Lasher: Most of the tutorial text in the academy was written by me, but the descriptions were written by others. I can code all day long and write helpfiles/tutorials no problem, but when it comes to actually describing something I hit a wall. If I wrote descriptions they would all turn out like “This is a sword”, “There is a wall here”. Even when I’m reading books I skip that stuff – I just need to know there’s a church the main character is about to enter, I don’t need to read two pages on the architectural style of its roof.

MH: Which works better for you: Fishing blindly for staffers in tried-and-true MUD forums or recruiting from within the ranks of Aardwolf's playerbase?

Lasher: Absolutely within the ranks of the playerbase. We’ve never recruited a staff member that wasn’t from the playerbase. In fact, at the time of writing we have only 10 active imms in total including myself and a handful of those are mostly just logging in to keep up with notes while they are busy with offline commitments. We’ve always operated this way and kept staff to a minimum by automating as much as we can. It’s worked out well for us, I find it much easier to keep a smaller team on the same page.

Keep in mind that builders are not considered “admins.” What makes a great quest coder and/or builder is not necessarily what makes a good person to deal with player questions and rule issues. All building takes place on another port. Many of the quests are player written – the Lua system is fairly easy to use and we have a handful of players who love to make new goals for others.

MH: What's the key, for you, in managing a staff on a text-based game, which is often volunteer-oriented and spread across the country, if not the globe?

Lasher: The key is finding the right people in the first place, making sure they know what is expected of them, then it just kind of runs. As they come from the player base and have usually been around a long time most of them already know how I feel about things and want the game to be run, and they’re motivated enough to have stepped up to imm in the first place. There’s no real “power” in being an imm on Aardwolf and no benefit to your player character, so people have to want to genuinely help improve the game and keep it running smoothly to take it on in the first place. We often joke that imms are monitored as much as players think the players are monitored.

MH: What's been the highest point for Aardwolf, in your mind? The game's greatest triumph?

Lasher: A player asked me this recently in an interview they did for an online broadcast and I really struggled to answer it. We’ve had our high and low points like every MUD but nothing jumps out as significantly above other events. One of the main ones would definitely have to be finally going live on a unique code base. We had so many false starts on that. It was rewritten in Java and about 80 percent done in 2000-2001 then the MUD grew to the point that Java simply wouldn’t support it (on the technology at the time) plus there were bugs in the Java implementation of Zlib at the time and MCCP is critical to us. It was started again in 2003 then put on hold when my daughter was born. Started again in 2005 then put on hold again later that year. In 2007 I was temporarily unemployed so took the opportunity to finally get it done – even then it took from August 2007 to March 2008 working in it pretty much full time and with dozens of players testing it to finally get it live. Nobody should ever underestimate the effort required to rewrite a MUD that is already running, it’s like rebuilding an airplane in mid air.

Perhaps the highest point of all that was when Hans Staerfeldt (one of the original authors of Diku) agreed to review our code when it was complete. Given the history of Aardwolf and challenges other MUDs have had with questions raised about whether or not their code is Diku, it was very nice to be able to do that. Receiving the email from Hans where he stated it was clearly not Diku and was also very complimentary on the code itself was the end of a chapter for Aardwolf that I’d have preferred never happened.

MH: What's been the lowest point? The game's biggest snafu, glitch or misstep?

Lasher: The lowest point, ironically, was during the development of the new codebase. One of the things I think people do enjoy about Aardwolf is the constant stream of changes and improvements, even after being online for so long. During that last 9 month period almost nothing got done so the game itself felt very stagnant to me. Players were also very concerned about the changes that were coming, we had to kill numerous “player wipe” rumors, etc.

The rewrite wasn’t just “convert exactly what we have today” but also incorporated a lot of changes. The look and feel was still the same by design but the game itself was quite different so naturally, when we actually went live some people didn’t like the new game as much and we took a hit to the playerbase.

Other than that, in 2004 we were down for just under 2 weeks when Hurricane Charley took out the power in Orlando. Two weeks after we came back up another hurricane took us out for six days. Two weeks after that, the third hurricane to hit Orlando that year took us down for another three days. The only comfort was that Florida Power were obviously learning on the job and getting faster at restoring power each time.

The server now, btw, is in a data center in Dallas (SoftLayer) and the building/test/backup server is in a data center in Wisconsin (LiquidWeb). The next hurricane to hit Orlando might take me offline, but not the MUD.

MH: What do you miss most about the smaller, more intimate playerbase of a fledgling game?

Lasher: Very little. I really enjoy that there is always something happening on Aardwolf, always a good group of people to talk to. The way the MUD runs there is the global population but when you break it down between clans and the “friend lists” everyone has (which includes a ‘friendtalk channel”) the MUD really doesn’t lose the intimacy because most people do most of their chatting on their friend list. It sounds like that could lead to “isolation” for some players, but it doesn’t, it works out quite well. The global channels are still active, but don’t have the insanity that you have with 400 players online and only global channels. The real concern there is for new players, obviously they haven’t met people and added them to friend lists yet, which is why we have a very active “helper” group and encouraging chatting / getting to know each other on the newbie channel.

If there’s a downside it is of course much more admin time and a lot more notes to read. I wouldn’t change it, but sometimes when you only have an hour or two to get something done then spend that time reading notes instead it would be nice to be smaller. I’d actually like to grow the MUD more (who wouldn’t, right?). A larger player base means you can add more games and global competitions that require player involvement and usually always have someone around to take part. It opens the window for new clans without diluting the existing ones, which always brings some new dynamics to the game as each clan has its own theme, skills, allies and styles of pk.

MH: What do you like most about a larger, broader playerbase now that Aardwolf has grown and prospered since 1996?

Lasher: Answered most of this in the question above – the fact that with so many people there is always something going on, the forums are active, it’s easy to get feedback (understatement), and lots of people interested and engaged in the game. I don’t know if “ego” is the right word, but there’s also a lot of personal satisfaction there too – to see so many people playing a game that you’ve had such a large part in creating. We’ve lost count of the number of offline marriages and children born to people who met in Aardwolf.

MH: When a new player experiences your game for the first time, what do you want them to feel? What do you expect them to take away from their introduction to Aardwolf?

Lasher: Most of this we already touched on, but the quick version would be that they leave feeling that while the game is “hack and slash” based there is enough depth and other things to do besides level that it is fun and doesn’t suffer from not having a more serious theme.

Even players that have been on the MUD for 10+ years will find things they didn’t know about – either side effects to their actions within areas themselves, or just commands they weren’t aware of. It’s always nice to see people comment “I had no idea that was there!” after being on the MUD for almost a decade.

We also have lots of hidden little “easter eggs” that are fun to find. Hint to Aardwolf players: some have never been found.

We do put a lot of work into making the community overall as friendly and helpful as possible, but we walk a fine line here because we try not to be over-bearing in the rules too and not everyone wants to be “friendly and helpful”. I think whether they like the game or not most people do leave with the impression that the game/community genuinely want to help new players get started and they’re welcome on Aardwolf. It is a place to hang out, chat with friends, join some games, level if they like, do quests and just take it easy. As with all online games, most people’s first experience really comes down to who is online at the time and whatever else is going on.

As a side note, this is where I struggle with MUD reviews in general – you can’t really review a MUD in depth unlesss you play it for weeks/months. Many MUDs have content and dynamics that you never even see until you’ve played them for a long time and Aardwolf is no different in that respect.

MH: You've got forums in-game, but not on the website. What motivated that choice?

Lasher: We’ve always had in-game forums so that is the “standard” for Aardwolf. I’ve never wanted to have split forums where some are on the web and some are in-game. What I’d really like to do is integrate the in-game forums with something like SMF so that posts on one automatically appear on the other.

We’ve actually taken some steps to work towards this recently – the behind the scenes structure of the boards in Aardwolf have changed to support threads and work in a way that lends itself better to integration with a webforum. The ‘who is online’ URL I mentioned briefly earlier was really just a test of the web interface in the MUD itself that will be necessary to support that.

So, this is more a matter of finding the time to do it properly rather than a policy decision to not have our forums on the web.

MH: What keeps you focused and in tune with Aardwolf? How do you renew your enthusiasm for a project that's into its second decade?

Lasher: I actually have the opposite problem – one of my biggest frustrations with Aardwolf is finding time to work on it more. After the three things I won’t give up (raising a young family, my career and working out/playing racquetball) there isn’t a whole lot left unfortunately. Every time we implement an idea, it spawns multiple new ideas and there is so much room for improvement / so many things we could do it’s frustrating not being able to get to it all. Development on Aardwolf is usually an hour or two here and there.

Occasionally, I’ll get a full day to work on it and those days are awesome. So, it’s not hard to maintain enthusiasm for it.

MH: Are text-based games doomed? Or, perhaps best to phrase it this way: How do you think text-based games can evolve and avoid extinction via natural selection?

Lasher: I wouldn’t say “doomed,” but I don’t think any of us can ignore trends over the last few years.

MMOs and the mass of other things to do on the web has definitely had an impact on text-based MUDs.

Even for those of us that have not seen their averages drop too much, you have to consider that as a “percentage of total internet users who play MUDS” or even the more specific “percentage of total internet users playing RPGs online who play MUDs.” If we plotted those on a graph rather than actual players online you’d see a much sadder looking picture.

I think this is partly because of the text interface itself and partly because some older MUDs tend to be stuck in a paradigm of “figure everything out for yourself”- MUDs need to make themselves more accessible.

There’s also the variety of these. If you can get an MMO player to try a MUD at all, they may only try one. If someone looking for immersive roleplaying stumbles across Aardwolf as their first MUD, or someone looking for hack and slash stumbles across an “RPI” MUD as their first MUD, they may never try another. It’s all so hit and miss.

We did some work with Nick Gammon (the author of MUSHclient) last year on making a custom version of MUSHclient for Aardwolf. There’s nothing custom in the MUSHclient code itself, btw, just a series of plugins. This came from me constantly seeing people new to MUDs struggle with configuring a client. Our reasoning was that if these scripts are all out there anyway we might as well accept that, standardize them and make them work. I emailed Nick to see if he was okay with me putting together a custom install of MUSHclient that included a bunch of scripts. We exchanged a few emails and he got interested in the project itself.

Overall, it was a great collaboration, many improvements were made both to MUSHclient itself (the miniwindows, hotspots, etc) and Aardwolf as a result of that work. Nick was awesome to work with, btw, highly recommend it if you ever have the opportunity.

Our experience since then has proved beyond a doubt there is definitely a demand for a game-specific client preconfigured where everything just works. MUSHclient is still a general client and still has that “tech” feel to it – as with any MUD client, you need to be somewhat comfortable technically to really get the most out of it. But even with what is there we’ve heard from many people who wouldn’t have played the MUD at all if not for the client.

We’ve seen a trend over the last few years where lots of MUDs have aded custom clients and after our experience with MUSHclient I’m starting to really understand the value of that.

MH: How do you think Aardwolf will change in the next five years? Ten?

Lasher: This one is hard to say. If you’d have asked me five years ago I wouldn’t have a good answer either. Short term, we have a project under way to built out 28 “subclasses” and add unique abilities to them. Most of these abilities are things that really change the balance or dynamics of the game so they take a long time to test and get just right, that is going to be out there for a while. I’d also like to have that forum integration completed eventually.

Thinking strategically/longer term, I do think we’ll end up with some kind of custom client. I’m torn between using Java or something else web-based and creating a more robust client that would more than likely require an install and have to run on Windows or a Windows emulator on other environments.

I do think we have to consider at least some kind of graphics at some point. Our map would lend itself very well to an overhead view and it would make the game so much more accessible. I’d never do that at the expense of being able to play the game via a traditional telnet based client, but it can both, it doesn’t have to be one or the other. There’s varied opinions on this on MUD boards. One argument says that people who really care about graphical games are already playing graphical games and those that don’t care, well, just don’t care.

I think there’s a middle ground where a certain amount of graphics will be enough to make the game accessible to a group of new players. Not the group who buy a new Gforce Ultra-Mega-Turbo-18 card three times a year to get 2.3 more FPS out of Call of Duty, but they’re at the other extreme end of the scale. There’s a lot of room in the middle.

Beyond that, it will be just doing what we’ve always done – reading ideas, designing quests and listening. I have lists of ideas that could easily consume several years to complete and I could lay out what I think we’ll implement in 2009. If past years are anything to go by (and there’s no reason to think they’re not), at least 50 percent of the things that will get added to Aardwolf this year aren’t even ideas yet.

I’ve always felt that if we could make potential players really try the game for a few hours then enough of them would stick around that we could grow again. Most players now find us by word of mouth or from MUD sites (TMS and TMC). Other than by asking people to vote for us, we’ve never been big self promoters on other sites and probably need to fix that. People will often ask me “When are we going to advertise more?” and I usually respond with “We will only get one chance to get folks to stick around, we’re not ready yet.” But really I don’t think I’ll ever consider it “ready” so maybe it is just time...

***

Thanks to Lasher for taking the time to answer our questions. Be sure to visit Aardwolf when you get a chance!

MU* Hosting Option: RPG-Works Zero

There's a new option for would-be MU* operators who don't want the recurring expense of hosting services:

RPG-Works Zero - you pay $29 in setup fees and make sure to log in to the shell once a month to prevent the account from being deleted due to inactivity. This option gets you the MU* shell, but doesn't include frills like web hosting or IRC chat support.

Great choice if you're just starting to explore MU* development and aren't ready to commit to a regular expense.

Tell them the MUDdy Hobo sent you!

Aardwolf: The second session

In the second visit to Aardwolf, I continued my exploration of the Academy's lessons. The economics class came with a bit of a job: The instructor handed me a shopping list that sent me to various stores and even out of the main city, into an orchard and off to a lake.

I gained several levels hanging out in the lake, trying to figure out which mob I had to kill to get the reed flute the lady wanted. Turns out: A shopkeeper near the lake sold the flute. BLURGH! :)

The next lessons dealt with communications and geography - how to talk to other people and how to get around. I'd already been dipping my toes into this a bit with previous lessons, but there's A LOT going on in-game, communication-wise, and these pointers are helpful.

While I continued my education, I observed the activity in the game. It's constant. If you want stimuli that indicates THIS GAME IS LIVELY, you get it. There's always a world quest or a special laser tag contest or some celebratory thing happening, like when someone hits max level and recreates themselves. People are always chatting and gossiping. Personally, I love the noise. For those who don't love it, though, you can silence much of the banter.

After I finished my lessons, I made my way back to the armor merchant and got a few new pieces of gear. Next session, I'll start trying to find my way around in earnest.

Waystation: MUDWiki

Inspired by a conflict with editors on Wikipedia who were trying to marginalize text-based games to the point of irrelevance, the MUDWiki (started in January 2009) endeavors to interactively chronicle the history of these games. The premise seems less about advertising and more about simply establishing a foundation of evidence that text-based games have a long history and remain relevant.

Aardwolf: The first session

Aardwolf is consistently the top-ranking text-based game at Top MUD Sites. Conspiracy theorists may claim this is because the current manager of TMS, Lasher, also runs Aardwolf. But Aardwolf was always prominent, even during the Synozeer days.

Before today, I'd never actually logged onto Aardwolf before. I decided this was a great chance to see what has made the place so popular and enduring since 1996.

First, I visited the website. It's clean and well-designed. They've got a game-related blog that publishes the latest in-game development news. And they've got a prominent PLAY NOW button that prompts you to download the Aardwolf client software.

What's nifty about the client software is that it's familiar to me: MUSHClient, customized to provide specialized windows for Aardwolf players. You get the main game window, your stats, and a map. Very nice.

Character creation is a fairly simple process. You pick a name, a class, a race, and then you're dropped into the live game. They've got hundreds of people on at any given time. I was greeted almost immediately on the Newbie channel despite the fact that I was just another face in the crowd.

The game nudged me onward to the Academy, where I began lessons to familiarize myself with Aardwolf's various systems: Skills, combat, healing, econ, equipment, etc. This was all automated, but I could stop at any time and come back to it later if I wanted. Some lessons gave three-question quizzes at the end, to ensure that I was retaining knowledge from the tutorial.

The only glitch I encountered: During the equipment session, I was given a bag so that I could learn to take stuff out. I took the items out and put them on. The tutorial warned that I couldn't proceed without having those items, even though I *was* wearing them. Once I took them off and put them in my inventory, however, the tutorial let me move on.

All in all, a very positive first glance into the world of Aardwolf. I'll report more as I continue exploring the world and its occupants.

Engineer's Note: New Facebook Group!

We've got a new MUDdy Hobo group on Facebook. Everyone's invited to join!

Off the Map: SimpleMU

The home site for my favorite text-based gaming client software, SimpleMU, has gone missing. Anybody heard what's come of it?

The good news: The software can at least still be downloaded from Tucows!

Waystation: The MUD Connector

The original text-based game clearinghouse site, The MUD Connector, went for more than a decade without a serious site facelift. Recently, TMC got a huge makeover. There's a lot going on at TMC (and this is both a help and a hindrance). They've got game discussion forums, reviews, rankings, social networking, and banner ads all in one place.

It's not always easy to navigate, but the revamp has helped a great deal to make TMC seem more energized and in touch with the community.

Waystation: Top MUD Sites

In its prime, Top MUD Sites provided robust discussions, competitive game rankings, and frequently updated (if sometimes controversial) game reviews.

These days, TMS isn't quite as vibrant. The review system has been broken for a while - no word yet on when it'll be fixed. The rankings can get pretty stagnant, with the same popular games filling the Top 20 month after month. Discussions aren't what they used to be, although they do spike in fits and bursts.

Right now, the greatest value provided by TMS is as a repository of MUD links and occasional advertising opportunities for games in the forums. It remains an excellent jumping-off point for travelers like the MUDdy Hobo to discover new worlds.

Riding the virtual rails

MUDing isn't dead.

Text-based online games are a small niche, but they're still around in spite of the grim prognosis given by many after the advent of graphical MMORPGs. They've been around for decades. Still, some of you reading this have probably never heard of MUDs, MUSHes, MUXes, or MOOs.

That's okay. It's never too late to jump aboard.

I'm the MUDdy Hobo. I'll be your guide through the galaxy of virtual worlds that have been created by imaginative and determined individuals. In this blog, it's my intention to share insights about text-based games, provide reviews and interviews of games and their makers, and to get the word out to the uninformed.

Fun doesn't always come with pretty pictures; sometimes you just make those pictures in your mind.

So, pack a duffel and hop aboard the box car. It's traveling time.