f13.net

Lately I've been thinking about my childhood on the internet. Specifically, I've been thinking about early ASCII game creation systems like ZZT (http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/1893-zzt-dos-screenshot-a-screenshot-from-the-1999-zzt-game-magic.gif), which allowed for anyone to make their own worlds with a little bit of basic scripting and creativity, which over time enabled people to make some pretty impressive games.

At the time, MUDs were flourishing, and professional MMOs were getting started. But professional MMOs weren't just an evolution of MUDs, they were different in a key respect -- they required significant technical talent and financial resources to create, such that an interested, non-technical creative person couldn't just jump in and begin building their own (or an addition to someone else's) in the same way that a person could do with a MUD. There are a lot of things I don't miss about MUDs, but one thing I definitely *do* miss is literally anyone being able to create their own with simple public tools.

I had just sort of assumed that over time, MUDs and ASCII game creation systems would merge, and we'd have "ZZT Online" or something like it. But that doesn't appear to have happened; there are graphical MUDs, but it's more about a graphical representation of a standard text MUD rather than a game fully played in 2D as ZZT or games like it were. Graphical "MMO creation systems" out there, like Eclipse and Mirage, seem more focused offering a certain pre-set sort of user experience (all the trappings of DIKU, buggily implemented), and skipped beyond ASCII to a level of graphics that acts as its own barrier to entry.

So here I'm wondering... why didn't an "ASCII MUD" scene ever take off?

its 2013, no one plays MUDS. Graphics do matter. There have been lots attempts at a home brew MMO tool set for the non professional over the years. MMO is just to much for a small team, let alone one that has no skills.

"Like wow, but better" does not cut it as a design Doc. Hell, you can likely make a better MUD with Gamemaker at this point, just add barely representative image files of Fonts.

Not shooting for 'mass market' here, and you'd be surprised how popular 2D MMOs and MMO-ish games are among the middle school crowd. ZZT was never mass market to begin with. Just something that anyone who wants to can easily play around with. It's been proven that people can be given tools to make persistent worlds and use them successfully... Graal (which as I understand it is financially very successful, but most twentysomething and thirtysomething MMOers have never even heard of) and NWN both pop to mind. The question is why, if people have proven there's a market for these tools, nobody's tried doing a *simpler but more flexible* version of those tools for ASCII game-worlds rather than SNES (Graal) or PSX-level (NWN) graphics.

I Assume because those tools, if they can handle image graphics, can handle fonts? It then becomes a matter of stylistic choice, or lack of ability. If you just want ASCII  for some odd reason, you can also use HTML5, or flash, or Gamemaker.....

Side note, when I look up Graal, I see a facebook game that looks like it was made in gamemaker, heavily inspired visually by Zelda a link to the past.

It's 2013 and people still play roguelikes, i think a multiplayer roguelike which is basically what he is asking for would be popular.

That's a game type, it does not imply the visual style. I seems as if hes wanting a tool-set to create a MMO with Fonts for graphics. That's already possible.

Fix your links.

pfft

I'm not arguing against fonts other than ASCII, per se, just using ASCII as a convenient shorthand for discussing font-based MMO gamebuilding.


That's exactly what I want. I agree that it's possible -- if anything, it should be significantly *easier* than all of the SNES or PSX-era graphical MMO toolkits that are out there (buggy as they are). It would be light-years easier than not only something like Second Life or Raph's MetaPlace.

My question to the peanut gallery is really... why hasn't anyone built one yet? And as a side question, why didn't anyone build one 5-10 years ago when projects like Eclipse and Mirage for homebrew MMOs were getting off the ground?


The key thing that stands out as important, to me, is a robust scripting language. If I want to have the game all of a sudden operate as ASCII Metal Gear Solid (hide in shadows, dodge the guards, get tossed in a jail cell if you get caught) when you walk inside one particular area, in ZZT I can prototype that in about 5 minutes (or less time than that, even, in one of ZZT's more fully-featured successors). Not because there's any built-in game mode for building a stealth action game, but rather because you have a fast, easy OOP scripting language  (the guard you're trying to dodge is a scripted object, and with about three lines of script you can have him follow a pre-set patrol route, and with 5 more lines of script you can have him raise a fuss and teleport the player to a jail cell if the player stands in the wrong place) to work with laid over an engine that has all the basic stuff (physics, movement, scripted object triggers) built in.

The old MUDs displayed this same ease of modification with low barriers to entry... you wanted to add an area of your own? Just start writing, and pop it in. This is where "font art" or "ASCII art" plays a role: people with zero artistic talent can still hop in and put in a bit of time, and make something cool looking:

(http://www.dessgeega.com/zzt/zzt_114.png)

I want that same degree of fast prototyping and anyone-can-get-involved-and-add-things ease-of-use for a 2D MMO, one that's not set up around a hard-coded DIKU formula where anything non-standard has to be kludged together with duct-tape.

This seems like a separate issue to ASCII art.  I wouldn't mind seeing more user driven content, stuff like Little Big Planet or Spore, but it seems like really heavily interpreted scripting languages are moored to a specific game types (you can't do a heavy story driven RPG in Spore, for example).  If you want ABCDEFG and the scripting language you're using can only do ABCDEF then you either can't make your game, or you have to start from scratch in a less structured environment.  It seems like a lot of these kinds of tools are stuck at the extremes of either easy to use and rigid, or hard to use but very flexible.


I'm not sure I get this.  ASCII art was born out of format limitations.  Now that those format limitations are lifted, I don't see why re-imposing them would lower the barrier to entry.  If someone wants to do a game about a dwarf, I'd think it would be a lot easier to get them to just open MS Paint and draw a dwarf than to force them to bash out an awkward ASCII representation of a dwarf.  Especially since if they're really in love with ASCII they can just screenshot their ASCII dwarf and use it as an image anyway.

Yeah, I don't see how what you're talking about would be any easier than a very simple tile-based graphical system. And I'm pretty sure there would be tons of basic pixel art tile graphics out there for free, if you know where to look.

Once again I have to bring up Neverwinter Nights.  That toolset was just brilliant and some of the Persistent World servers gave me much better experiences than I had with most MMOs.  I just think that the biggest issues these days is that no one WANTS to put content creation in the the hands of players/users, they want to keep everything in house.

Yes, NWN is definitely the model I think they want.

Trouble is not the tools. It's never been about the tools, but instead about time and will.

Time because it takes a lot of it to make a competent game others will want to play for longer than the "oh cool that's interesting" first few minutes your average iOS game gets.

And will because it takes a lot of it to go through the natural evolution from "heh this is easy I'll just copy X and tweak it a bit" to "shit, this isn't so easy maybe I should ask a buddy for some help because they have talent Y" to "goddamnit my fucking life/wife/job/kids/loans/classes are getting in the way of me getting this thing done" through "holy fuck if I never have a shot at completing this I'm gonna need more than my circle of friends who each have their own shit to deal with, better get legit and son of a bitch I'm going to have to pay them" into inevitable "ya know maybe it's time to hit up kickstarter/fuck it all and use what I've got to see if I can get a gig at Valve".

The only way game creation gets easy is when someone creates a game creation wizard that does 80% of the work for you and bangs out one of four crappy game mechanics nobody cares about.

Having said all that, the only thing holding something like this back beyond time/will and whether there's a market for it. Unfortunately, the best way to find out is to build enough of it to see if someone's willing to fund the rest, or self-fund and take a chance with kickstarter/greenlight.

http://www.mudconnect.com/

Yep, totally dead site. Not updated in.. oh wait..

Are you talking about this thing?
http://www.achaea.com

Hay look a tiny .0000000001% of gamers.

Also, even in the heyday, no one played muds. They had scripts for that. Even fans found them tedious.

Point being, there is little draw form them in the modern age. Except Nostalgia.

Sorry, maybe I'm missing something, but that looks exactly like a MUD?

(also that voiceover lol)

Wow, I didn't know Achaea was still a thing.

Yet you come here and continue to spew opinions on a site that caters to an even smaller percentage of gamers.  :awesome_for_real: 

Fact is there's still several hundred MUDs that get 100+ players per night.  Yes, more than one text-based game with more active users than this site.  Gemstone III and IV are still a thing for chrissakes and they charge subs in this day of 3d games.   

Not liking or knowing about a thing doesn't mean it's not a thing, and your statement was wrong. You can be wrong without being pilloried, however at the moment you're arguing home brewing is dumb because Budweiser is out there.

Hay, like what you like. But muds are near irrelevant.

In the era of micro-segmentation, who gives a damn about 'relevant'?

Well, maybe, but it seems a lot more pro than any MUD that I ever played.  Maybe you're interested in a graphical middle-ground that I didn't quite pick up on, in which case aren't we moving into roguelike/ARPG?

When did you turn into a dick?

Show us on the doll where the muds touched you.

Acuity, I already said you can probably use existing game creation software and just use fonts, or images of fonts to create the graphical look. The original question was why there was no custom, directed tools to create MUD/ASCII games. My answer was popularity of the genre, a tiny user base is not going to spawn a AAA middleware.

"why didn't an "ASCII MUD" scene ever take off?"

I Answered.

As far as me saying all Muds are bad and you should feel bad. I'm the last person to tell someone not to like a niche thing, And I haven't.



Sure. Increasingly, you can no longer say Muds have much to do with modern games, even MMO's. Maybe 5 years ago you could say they did. Every single person I know who played muds didn't really play them, they used scripts and just checked in in the AM. Progress quest evolved out of that. Most Muds I know or games based on them have countering script progress speed as a features now ( lots of examples of Progress slowing mechanics and design discussed over the years here ), I believe its where we get "the grind" from. It was an effort to slow down the speed you could consume content VIA script. It Bleed over to MMOs when Muds were still a template. Meanwhile, we have been left with some of the very tropes people on this site profess to hate, left over from when muds were a relevant structure for games, including MMO's. So, I always find it hard to contrast how some people think "Muds were awesome" while bemoaning about MMO Features that were direct results of them. I also can't find a better example of "Playing alone, together" then Muds.

Thankfully, just like Tab target, eleventybillion skill combat, the MuD influence is dying out.


Not me, but its pertinent to your question.

Thirty years after MUDs and MOOs were the main online gaming experience, we are only now starting to see MMOs evolve away from them.

They're still pretty damn relevant, whether we like it or not, and whether we recognize it or not.

I'm interested in a system that allows for ARPG / roguelike gameplay, definitely -- just as ZZT and its cousins did.

But that's the thing -- there's tons of MUD middleware out there. But none for people who want to build something 2D graphical with a high degree of flexibility in gameplay.

I, I don't understand what you mean or want. Can you list the features you want?

I should probably 'show' rather than 'tell'. Here's a video from a classic ZZT game, Ned the Knight:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTHb7qusnyU

Ned the Knight did a lot with a little. Sword-swinging-y ARPG gameplay, essentially ASCII Zelda. (Sword swinging wasn't a default behavior available in ZZT, but it only takes about 15 minutes of simple scripting to script it in). I wish there were middleware out there to build something like that, but multiplayer.

For a more puzzle-y focus, here's a video of an old ZZT game called Winter, which has no combat, only puzzle solving:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y46meaH7rM

You can get a sense of what I'm looking to build from these, I think. "The same sort of thing as was possible then, but multiplayer."

That's completely doable in Game maker Studio. Also, because all your Visuals will be on one sheet, you could likely do it all in the free version.

http://www.yoyogames.com

http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/games/214376-ascii-map-editor

http://www.yoyogames.com/tech_blog/11

Interesting... I hadn't realized Game Maker Studio added networking this year. Though it seems like the networking features are pretty rudimentary thus far. Then again, there's no reason they won't improve in the future...

Though a lot of people are saying "Use MMF2 for that sort of thing, it's better suited," and then I look into small-scale MMOs with MMF2 and everyone on that side says MMF2 is horribly suited to the task. :X

You could do that too. Hell, you could use flash. As for networking, its possible to add your own, our use a resource to add it. Keep in mind, Terraria is a Game maker game, and has multiplayer. You wanted a low barrier to entry, i think game maker as it is fits that, networking not withstanding.

It's definitely doable in Flash -- Realm of the Mad God, RuneScape (though maybe it's changed), it's definitely been done. The problem is that then you have to be a programmer and code it. I'm comfortable working with scripting languages, not so much with coding. Multiplayer without a persistent server is a bit of a different beast, though I suppose it can't hurt to start there.

No one said it would be easy. There are tons of middle ware out there where scripting is all you do.

I'm not sure you're fully thinking through the implications of going from single player to multiplayer.

There are many, many implications of that switch, obviously -- but I'm not saying "the exact same thing but multiplayer", rather "in the same vein".

Hee hee, #zap :) Perfect name. Will definitely follow this project...

Lets poke it with sticks and see what happens.

Nurse!! There is a bot in my thread!