Not every week of development produces flashy new features and this past week was one of those weeks.
A lot of our effort went into improving the underlying engine that powers the game: we made changes to how the world is stored, performed some cleanup following earlier refactoring efforts, and continued to make performance improvements. While these changes aren’t the sort of thing players will immediately notice, they’re important long-term investments in the health of the project.
It’s been a productive week of development and we’ve reached a few milestones that are helping the world feel more like a MUD.
One area key to our design goal is exploration. We recently implemented secret doors that can be discoved by attentive players who pay close attention to their surrounding and experiment with the world around them. One of the things we love about classic games is the feeling that not everything is immediately obvious. Sometimes, a room description contains more than flavor text and curiousity is rewarded with hidden passages, forgotten spaces, and new opportunities for adventure.
As we think about the kinds of games we want to spend our evenings playing, we keep coming back to the same ideas: exploration, cooperation, and memorable challenges overcome together.
While our MUD project is still in a very early prototype stage, that vision is already shaping the work we’re doing. Our goal is to create a fun PvE-focused experience where adventurers can join forces to face the dangers threatening the realm. Whether that means standing against marauding dragons, confronting demonic forces, or tackling other deadly encounters, we want success to feel like something earned. We’ll still make sure there is plenty of content for solo-play, too, so if your schedule doesn’t align with your party members’, you’ll still have fun.
We’re building a MUD, or multi-user dungeon. It’s currently without a name, but we’ll be using this site for news about our progress and making it available to you all once it’s ready for players.