This thing is my fault, if anyone has questions/nits/etc.
The usual one is whether the code is somewhere. The short term answer is no, but I did pick out a name and set up a repo for anyone interested to watch, if I ever get to that point: https://github.com/abathur/roomstead
Gameplay is missing a few niceties that you see in slightly more sophisticated games (but, I see you listed LPC as a programming language, so I assume you know that). For instance, if the visible exits are north and south, I can't 'go north'. Instead, I just have to enter 'north' as a command. Likewise, I can't 'look at' a thing; it's just 'look <thing>'. It'd also be great to be able to 'take', 'get', and 'drop' certain things.
On the plus side, I like what happens when you do 'report bug'. At one time, I also considered making a resume kind of like this, except my idea was to embed it as JS code inside a PDF document. The PDF version of the resume doesn't look very good, though. It has a mostly blank first page with just a title, header, and footer when I 'print' it on my machine.
Yes, the mechanics/mudlib are a bit sparse. It's stacked on top of a ~terminal JS library, but all of the ~MUD behavior is hand-rolled. It's a bit LP/LD-family-esque, but I've tried to completely exclude as many concepts (health, heartbeats, resets, classes, etc.) as I can get away with.
(Though, if I abstract out and publish the ~game/mudlib layers at some point, I don't think I'd be opposed to it accumulating some features beyond my own golden path.)
Hmm. I don't think so. Not consciously, at least. The site feels a bit familiar, and I would probably click on a link to it if I stumbled on it elsewhere, so I may have at least seen it.
I did this for a website once, but I just ran it on port 23 (telnet). The "game" version had all the same information and functionality as the more mainstream-designed www site on the same host. It ran for 4 years though and not once was it found or used by a real human as far as I can tell. Made me feel like the internet was really dead. I first discovered MUDs as a child while portscanning for open SMTP servers so I could send spoofed email to my friends. It really did used to be a different experience using the net.
> I first discovered MUDs as a child while portscanning for open SMTP servers so I could send spoofed email to my friends
a growing set of Gen Alpha kids are doing the same in "metaverse"-branded online worlds, but earning a little crypto here and there from whatever they launch or interact with and use it to buy knockoff jpeg apes
maybe a lot of things make more sense with that knowledge, not a lot of people understand whats going on yet, but probably the same distribution of people that figured out children with computers were portscanning in whatever decade that was
Good analogy - portscanning and email spoofing was considered a relatively benign issue decades ago, but would be quite serious now and does lead to jail time, and I'm sure the same will be true with cryptocurrencies (unless you're in a failed state where the rule of law is a bug not a feature).
> a growing set of Gen Alpha kids are doing the same in "metaverse"-branded online worlds, but earning a little crypto here and there from whatever they launch or interact with and use it to buy knockoff jpeg apes
We really are approaching "Snow Crash" in real life
Yeah, I didn’t realize at the time that up-to-date emoji support wasn’t universal, even on the latest OS versions. The “extra” emoji are a result of your system not yet supporting some of the symbols used.
I chose emoji more carefully in my next game, a demo of the excellent interactive fiction game Counterfeit Monkey originally by Emily Short:
I sometimes wish text adventures would still have a bit more prominence today. It's nice to see games at super-high fidelity, but these old-fashioned text adventures are so "easy" to make, they're a fantastic way to get into programming as a hobby. As a kid, learning to code was reasonably easy because it was fun; I could make games for my family and friends, and at the time I started, not much was required other than access to a pirated disk of Turbo Pascal or Q-Basic.
I remember when Mode 13h took over and things got a lot more complicated (and also fun, for those who could work it all out). Once I had mastered Mode 13h, a whole new world opened but I wondered how someone could dive into programming if that was the first hill to climb.
And then the demo scene hit me, along with hacky but exciting 3D-2D projections, from plasmas and fractals to Voxel graphics (Commanche!), and that eventually required even more complicated maths that threw me out of the game-making. I remember at the time that I couldn't wait to "grow up" and reach a stage in school where they'd teach me the maths necessary to keep up with the requirements of game design at the time. I never returned to it, unfortunately.
Text adventures were a fantastic and light-weight way into all of it. Every time I try to convince a kid to try and make one, they struggle to get excited about it. They want to make Minecraft and Fortnite, and I don't even know where to begin to explain. So, yeah. Time to learn Unity.
> I sometimes wish text adventures would still have a bit more prominence today.
Text adventures are still alive. Its just called Interactive Fiction now. There's also a whole bunch of modern (often open source) tools available to create them.
The usual one is whether the code is somewhere. The short term answer is no, but I did pick out a name and set up a repo for anyone interested to watch, if I ever get to that point: https://github.com/abathur/roomstead