PvP combat is something that is very dear to my heart and nothing quite beats the rush from testing myself against a human opponent. You just don’t get those extremes of emotion from the elation of victory to the utter despair of defeat when fighting against mobs. One problem you are going to face when designing a PvP combat system is how to control the impact of client side scripting… Continue reading
I know I said last time I was going to look at areas where graphical games could learn from text MUDs, but I don’t think that’s a very interesting topic. I think it’s far more useful for those of us working in text to look at what we can learn from the big budget modern graphical MMORPGs. Here are a couple of design themes from modern MMORPGs that I’d like… Continue reading
This article on Massively about the Hero Engine MMORPG development platform made me smile. Yes I suppose the fact that multiple developers can work collaboratively on the same server while seeing the results of each others work in real time is pretty revolutionary. At least for graphical MMORPGs anyway.
The concept is probably quite familiar to anyone who has ever developed a text MUD. I think that TinyMUD way back… Continue reading
I’ve talked before about how I think more commercial muds would benefit the whole of the mudding community and in this article I’m going to look at some of the options mud creators have for commercialising their work.
In a subscription model all players pay a regular fixed amount to access the game. Players are usually able to play for free for a limited time before deciding whether to subscribe. This… Continue reading
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
