Jeremy's Blog

I covered a few of my goals for Journey of Souls in my previous post. Dutch and I actually kept our plans to book club this evening and it brought about some discussion on a few game mechanics that we’d like to see in Journey of Souls. First of all, there’s a huge disparity between people who spend way too much time playing games and people who play casually. We want to make some enhancements to try to reduce that disparity and try to keep it fair to the players who do invest their time. Second, we’ve identified ways to enhance our use of the spirit realm to give it a few “eerie” but what we believe to be very cool effects. We’ve also discussed ways to clearly communicate what’s in the spirit realm versus what’s in the physical realm and different “affinities” to different areas in the spirit realm. Finally, we want to make it clear that we’re going to try to make in-game (or in character) consequences to as much “bad” behavior as possible. We don’t want to write code to prevent people from doing logical things, no matter how screwed up their logic might be. Instead, we want there to be in-game consequences to all of your actions. (continue reading…)

This post was scheduled to be published on the other 09:09:09 9/9/09 for the day. Cause I’m corny like that.

As some of you may or may not know, I’ve been off and on working on a MUD called Journey of Souls. I wanted to take a moment to go over what my plans are for the game for the benefit of those of you who don’t read what I write on Anfiniti. Dutch and I’ve been more inspired to work on the game lately, and we’ve even decided to book club a selection of chapters from a game development book which closely relate to what we’ll be doing. The plan is for this book club to actually start this weekend, so we’ll see how that goes.

At the moment, I’m right on the edge of finally choosing the language we will be developing the MUD in. We originally started in PHP, but there are some things that it can’t do (without some highly unsupported extensions) that some languages (say, Python) can do by default. And then there’s that whole we plan to run this on a server for months at a time thing. I originally started with PHP for two reasons, one of which was to prove it could be done in PHP (and done well). So, we’re still surveying that landscape to figure out what we’ll finally be settling on. I’d like to make a decision by the weekend, because I’d like for us to do any examples from our book club in the language we’ll actually be writing the code for the game in. Anyway, onto my goals for the game …

My goals are a bit lofty. It’ll be a long time before the game is available to the public, but I’ve been slowly gathering together ideas over the years for different things to incorporate into the game and different ways to get it out to the masses, once it’s ready. I want to try to summarize my goal for JoS into this post and give you guys all an idea of the type of game I’m going for. If I could just get the cat to stop sticking hair to my monitor. (continue reading…)