One thing I always find vaguely startling is how little attention many text games pay to their descriptions. As I have indicated in previous blog posts, I often spend time checking out new MUDs. If there’s anything with an interesting theme or what looks to be an original idea or two about how things should…
Today I am going to start off an occasional series for Mud Commentary – something I have been thinking of as the ‘immutable rules of Epitaph’. I talk a lot on this blog about why various design decisions were made and what the issues are, and I try to relate those back to examples I…
For a lot of commands on Epitaph, we’ve adopted a cooldown system to moderate use. Today I thought I’d talk a little bit about that design decision, and what the benefits are that come from it. Cooldowns, for those who have never encountered the term before, are delays between your last use of a command…
It was twenty years ago today[1] that I put in place the achievements system on Discworld. I’ll be honest – I had no idea what to expect from it, how popular it would be, or whether it would end up being a throwaway feature that only I ended up using. In fact, the latter was…
Text games are a pretty hard sell. I think that’s a statement with which anyone involved with the format would agree. It’s hard to get awareness of your game out there, it’s hard to get people to log on when they know about it, and it’s hard to get them over the initial hurdle of…