January 26, 2008

"You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike"

When I was a kid, a pack of us used to play Dungeons & Dragons and I was often coerced into the role of Dungeon Master. Yes, it was as nerdy as it sounds but hey, it was fun and really, really cheap entertainment. One adventure I ran my victims, err ... cohorts through required them jumping blindly into portals to go from the current section into the next (really, it was just a way to buy time as I made up the next part). Plus, I could make up anything without needing it be consistent with the previous setting.

They hated the portals.

They were right to. It was a cheap and crummy design.

I'm fleshing out the geography system for the MUD, e.g. moving from one location to another. Historically, these are called 'rooms' with simplistic, direction based linking between them. You're in 'The Dining Hall' and go 'north' to be in the 'The Kitchen'. The simplicity of this design lends itself to a text based MUD. I could sweat area dimensions and the coordinates of players, creatures, and objects but how do I convey that to a player in a meaningful way using words alone? If you have to kill the goblin king to get his scepter, do you really care what bearing and how many meters away he is?

One concern I had was dropping players into a lady and the tiger scenario where they type 'east' and suddenly find themselves in certain death. The answer to this is the same as it is in books. Foreshadowing. Alan Quartermain doesn't sail his canoe smack into the headhunters' camp. He finds skulls on sticks, burned settlements, gross nasty things that all say, 'turn the hell back, Dude.'

In other words, it's not a programming problem.

No comments: