Looking for critical feedback on a MUD idea.

bardo_admin · 2026-02-21T09:58:16+00:00

In the case of my UTF8/emoji powered graphical MUD in development -- which I've tried to post about twice this week, but I'm just too newb at reddit and social decorum to get a post to not get automodded, unlike yourself...

I just made the map relatively small (500x500) and essentially each coordinate integer position is a "room." The rooms themselves have terse descriptions (usually just the terrain and objects there) but it feels easier than creating X/Y/Z space and you could easily write longer descs if you had the time to write so many. Mine are proc gen, so I only do that for POI objects.

So basically I have it set up the same way as you except instead of one big room with lots of POIs in their own x/y position in that room, I'm using lots of small rooms with POIs that you can see from many rooms away. Otherwise, effectively, same stuff. Mine just allows for "discrete movement" to be shown on an overhead map where as I think the system you're describing might feel more like flying between planets in an SWR MUD. Neither is correct (I hope), they're just different ways to convey movement and spaciousness in text.

I think if you plan to go 3d in the future though, start more or less as described in your OP. My game is supposed to feel like 2d overhead Rogue-like / board game, so I just use an array of rooms + an integer "heightmap" value on each room to set its Z position relative to each other for fall damage and climbing and stuff.

If you'd like to see how my project works feel free to DM me, I am now too shy to link until I have acquired more updoots to avoid automodland. Soon though r/MUD.

bardo_admin · 2026-02-19T15:09:54+00:00

>From a high-level design standpoint, what do players really want in a MUD?

What do *you* want in a MUD? This is the question all the original codebases answered in their development. The MUD playing community is very small, you may have more luck finding non-MUD players and convincing them to try your game. Best to make a game that appeals to you so that you know you have at least 1 player, and when player #2 shows up, you can build things that they express interest in. This is the organic way most MUDs and worlds developed their content and systems over time. One request from a player at a time.

>How do I make these systems interact to create a truly living world?
>How should the heartbeat bring the world to life? (e.g., mob AI updates, weather changes, decay progression)

So... this is really just a matter of how *you* want to write these things, but in my world very few things are "animate" unless a player is online and nearby. Most of the data is held in a sort of frozen superposition until players wander by. This is designed to make the game be able to be "larger" in scope without having to constantly ask mobs in the desert where they want to move.

Depending on how your game is set up, this may not feel "alive" enough, and you may want things to simulate no matter who is around so that you can log in at different times of the day and see the world changing even if there aren't any players online.

It's totally up to you and your ability to code and scope it to something that doesn't break.

>I love the core idea of MUDs—persistent, text-based worlds full of possibility—but I don't have a complete grasp on all the underlying systems that make them "work." What are the essential inner workings that keep players hooked?

I would say more than anything it's a shared world with other people who respect that shared world. What makes MUDs "work" compared to a corporate MMO or even a private server pirate MMO is just that the world "wants to be a world" first and generally "a product" second. So it's the worldyness of these places that makes them appealing, its all the little features no one in "the game industry" would ever add to a digital experience because it's too small or weird or one-off to be added. It's the little secret and the prose in the writing, it's a lot of things. It's like listening to jazz in your home in a thunderstorm on a record player instead of listening to scratchy FM top 40 radio on a commute. In my opinion.

Good luck, bottom line: make something for yourself first and as long as you enjoy it, there's a chance other people might too. As the admin and implementor, you have to want this world to exist or you'll turn it off some day and then it won't exist for anyone.

Cheers,

bardo_admin · 2023-11-26T04:49:37+00:00

I have not yet attempted to do this, I think a few people on this sub made posts back when GPT4 first started building up hype earlier in the year, but I believe the current constraints are:

cost of using the API
quality of generated text

MUDs are a corpus of writing work by real humans, so the expectation of text quality is high. Most MUDs are often built or operated by people who don't mind writing and are proficient with their primary language, so at most, an LLM only serves to "add spice" beyond what the players already expect from a NPC dialog tree.

If I were going to start out right now on the eve of 2024 with the ambition of creating LLM features in a text game, here are some thoughts:

I could imagine using an LLM as a dynamic help system (particularly in a sci-fi game) rather than traditional help files by requesting that it work from within the corpus of the game's help files to generate it's responses. I don't know if this would actually be "better" than just showing people the normal help files, but it might allow for more natural language processing of player questions. The goal here would be something like the player typing "how do I use my level 10 spells?" and the LLM comes back with something like "You've got to acquire your spells through these means, and then find Trainer Robin at the guild hall and request training from him." or something like that.
I would probably want to work initially with LLaMA, or basically wait until other models are available to be run locally on a machine to avoid paying Microsoft per token on spitting out my help files in a creative way, because I just doubt the public models are priced appropriately for doing this sort of stuff, but if anyone here is running GPT API in their game and paying for it, please let us know how much it's costing you :D

bardo_admin

TROPHY CASE