The first thing I want to say is that there are plenty of high quality MUDs out there that are run on a non commercial basis.  Now that’s out of the way, I believe that were more MUDs to go commercial, even on a relatively modest scale, it would benefit the MUD community as a whole.

As I have said before, I believe that MUDs offer unique gameplay opportunities beyond… Continue reading

I want to talk a little bit about some of the things that can be done to enhance the visual appeal of MUDs. This may sound a bit odd given that a MUD is all about text, but the text can still be presented in ways that are are more visually appealing. This is particularly important if you want to attract players new to MUDs who may find the look… Continue reading

I believe that MUDs’ greatest strengths are also their greatest weakness; namely that they are quick and cheap to setup and run. While this means MUDs can offer some of the unique gameplay I mentioned in my last post it has also undoubtedly lead to an explosion in the numbers of mediocre games. New players discovering MUDs through a major listing site such as TMC are presented with huge… Continue reading

In my last post I asked what MUDs can offer players that they can’t get from more modern graphical virtual worlds. In order to answer this question we need to look at what makes MUDs unique.

The single biggest difference between MUDs and other virtual world platforms is the relative ease with which MUDs can be developed. While producing a quality MUD is still a large undertaking, the number of… Continue reading

This week saw the 30 year anniversary of the original MUD so I thought it would be a good time to offer my thoughts on the state of MUDs.

MUDs don’t get a lot of press these days and if you weren’t aware of them you’d be forgiven for thinking that players and developers had all moved on to graphical MMORPGs and virtual worlds a long time ago. I remember… Continue reading

It’s been one month since I put together MudGamers.com so I thought it would be a good time to reflect on how the site has developed and what I have learned from the exercise so far.

Looking at the numbers, the site has 114 registered members and 31 listed games, of which 7 are using the Flash client.

Here are a few of the things that have struck me about the… Continue reading

In my last post I made the case for a new type of mud portal site that would be more accessible to players who may be new to mudding. In one of those “I’ll do it just to see if I can” type moments I decided to put together MudGamers.

The two main areas I wanted to improve on over existing mud portal sites were presentation and accessibility. MudGamers… Continue reading

I have been thinking lately that one thing the mud community lacks is a good portal site that is aimed at promoting muds to new players. I posted some thoughts in this thread but nobody on that site seemed to care enough to comment so I thought I would expand my ideas a little more here :).

The main mud portal sites I am aware of are Top Mud

Getting accused of being a thief is never nice, but what really irritates me is how willing some people are to fire off accusations in a public forum without taking any steps to verify their information.

Someone has looked at the login sequence for Maiden Desmodus and the posts of sample mud output on the forum and concluded that the game is so similar to another that we… Continue reading

I’ve been rather quiet lately as I’ve been heavily involved in coding for a new online text game (MUD). The code is based on NakedMud by Geoff Hollis and has been a lot of fun to work with. It’s a C core extended in Python and fortunately I’ve been able to do most of the work in Python which has made development a relative breeze so far.

Here’s the… Continue reading