Welp, that's definitely a bug! Flee is supposed to move you to an adjacent room on completion, which is, of course, exactly what it did until some time today. Working on a fix now!
The last time this came up, it was an unhandled exception that basically killed the combat thread. Probably something similar this time. In any case, thanks! Hoping to get it back into a playable state shortly, haha.
Not OP but somebody else who has worked on the platform. Thanks for the feedback! I can't give quite as good of a response as teebes but I'll take a crack at it.
- Patreon isn't the ideal subscription service but it was the most lightweight tool we could find for the job since some users wanted to contribute and it didn't make sense to integrate a full payment platform right now. Is there a particular reason that you find it off-putting?
- Telnet actually came up recently on the Discord. It's something we might do, but would take a fair bit of work and loses out on some of the UI we've incorporated to try to make combat a little more engaging like cool down timers and cast bars. That said, we're not opposed to it if there's enough demand and people would actually use it.
- We've actually had a few visually impaired players and gotten some very useful feedback! There is a 'Use Accessibility Layout' option that tries to optimize the experience for screenreaders, although there is likely room for iteration.
- That's a fair point and may be tough to optimize to the same degree while taking advantage of the more modern frameworks that make the platform (hopefully) more user-friendly. That said, there's probably some refinement that could be done there to at least help a little and I would imagine that once in-game, the packets going back and forth don't put too much strain on the connection.
Always good to hear from people who know the space!
Yeah, Telnet will definitely be a lot of work if you do decide to go for it. For cooldown bars and such, I'll recommend using a subnegotiation protocol for all that (GMCP is the one widely used these days, all the major clients support it to some extent and it's effectively just a 'string + json blob' payload), and my experience is often "if you make it available, it will be built" with MUDs.
I'm extremely happy to hear that visually impaired players are accounted for. It was always one of my personal 'hills to die on' in MUD development.
As for Patreon, it's just personal preference. I just want to be able to put in my card details and go - Patreon makes me juggle Yet Another Account and, if you aren't a Patreon user already, the time to get a subscription is highly increased. Anecdotally, I'm not the only one I know who feels this way. I spent years just avoiding anything that made me sign up for a Patreon account just to avoid the hassle of it, and only caved in to support a friend's project. I know some who will still just see Patreon and run the other direction. It also might just be me, but I have horrible luck with services that integrate with it - it won't link the patreon account or recognise that I'm paying, and I need to get manual intervention on getting the thing I'm subscribing to.
This is an exciting project! Been hoping someone would build a decent modern MUD creator - I played MUDs a long time ago but have been disappointed to see the medium largely stuck in 90s conventions. At least from my perspective telnet is an anti-feature because it limits design possibilities. There's already tons of telnet MUDs out there, I'd try to push the boundaries of what is possible in a web browser instead, and be willing to break some rules and expectations of MUDs. I'd love to see music, environmental effects and rich media, some focus on buttons > text parsing, and generally trying to adopt modern conventions and trying new things.
Accessibility on the other hand is 100% a good thing to implement. Text adventures are more than any other medium theaters of the mind, and any additions you make to them should fall back gracefully to that core idea.
It's frustrating how hard of a sell the text medium can be, especially with how creative authors have grown to explore what visual media isn't well-suited for. So many of my avid gamer friends just won't give anything with such a minimal UI an honest shot, even if they loved playing similar games in the past when it was more of a necessity.
Incidentally, I was actually thinking of submitting something that I'd been working on for the competition, but I didn't think it would qualify since it was already publicly distributed. It's up at https://writtenrealms.com/worlds/7996/brimstone-prologue, so if anybody is into this kind of thing and has some time to kill, I'd actually love to hear any feedback!
Sure, it may not completely be a corollary of compound interest, but the fact that there are people that can live entirely off of the passive income generated by their assets and have some left over to invest further illustrates that the game is fundamentally different at higher levels of wealth.
There are some projects like https://writtenrealms.com that are trying to modernize the MUD and lower the barrier to entry, but they are still coming together and most of the ones with an established player base / full feature set are still the traditional telnet setup.
