as posted in discord, in the new build we're introducing a new version of the practice system. instead of each lineage receiving a static number of practices, practices will cost money. the cost will scale on level and training tier. every skill has 3 tiers.

New house powers for Raiders and Merchants tonight. Will have more posted in Discord and in-game soon. :)

recently tried a prototype NPC healer. the idea is to create a suite of NPCs for various roles to support groups of PCs where that role being missing more or less completely precludes doing some kinds of content. they are strong but not as good as hero-level PCs. gonna do some refinement soon.

we should have a working model of the new practice system soon. curious to see how people interact with it.

In the past I have attempted to remove my personal feelings from rules enforcement because that is what I thought fairness was but I think that I was wrong about that. if someone is being so consistently belligerent that our interactions with them are just poisoned, that itself is worth acting on.

GNU Terry Pratchett, whose words will echo long after we, and our children, and our children’s children have moved on thank you, as always, for making me a better person (quote from Reaper Man)

Middlebrow media enjoyers rise up. We want art with complex stories and emotional nuance featuring characters with interiority and yes we also want them to solve a murder or be a spy or kill a vampire or something

Really want to finish the lineage lore books (aka bookman) for the school of heroes this week. shuddeni is probably the biggest lift remaining. "what did the shuddeni do before the war of night?" uhhhhhhh,

It's a big #gamedev day with getting called bitchy by a player for attempting to explain design decisions he doesn't like. I will not be looking at prod or discord for a few days.

rapidly approaching the point at which I have to actually sit down and sketch out some fight specs and I Don't Wanna I know it won't actually take me that long now once I scrape it together but there's still plenty of manual work involved!

at what point in a work do they cease being OCs and simply become Cs

When I see a written description of a piece of art in a game and it is only about the subject of the art, with absolutely nothing about how the art itself looks, that's a poor description no matter how cool the subject was. It's like trying to read a novel with every third word blacked out.

I'm gonna work on a new guideline document for roleplay and plots. Feels like folks could benefit from guidance.

Finished the prototype of my shapeshifter mob that responds to natural language requests to transform into any lineage/gender combo. Most complex prog I've ever worked on by far and IT WORKS 🥳

Engaging imagination in ways like this is why we still love MUDs.

LRP isn't totally true, I published three new articles today on the wiki

it do be like this sometimes

finally figuring out why a first gen dev structured his progs a certain way does not actually make those structures less annoying, as it turns out

Current status.

When a little riff that you play captures your own attention, you can easily sit for hours straight repeating it, refining it, building on it, trying variations of it, and before you know it it’s 3 AM. In my experience, it’s not even right to call this experience “enjoyable”. It’s something else.

jolinn. buddy. why are all the female NPCs you made redheads.

there are altogether too many quotable paragraphs in this must-read article but i think i can restrain myself to just this one

hypocrisy. characters feel at their most alive when they give advice they'd never follow, think one thing and do another, or display two contradictory beliefs without noticing. too many characters out there are *consistent* in a way humans aren't

I've been annoyed about project tracking tools so much lately I am talking Alil info simply letting me build one in our engine instead not sure this is the kind of portfolio item people are talking about

as it turns out when you train an agent on your scripting language you can make a lot of neat things very quickly

Wrapping up the second draft of the magic documents today and honestly, the setting fiction really underlines the Iandir/Ashur/Jolinn relationship well. Iandir is just the operations officer forcing the HR and IT officers into a room together.

I have got to get some Frazetta prints for our house. Frazetta's art is distinct from the usual fantasy cheesecake imo from both a technical skill perspective and the fact that you can tell he really, genuinely loved how bodies really look. it comes through!

first successfully generated are flat file. about 80% done with implementation of this at this point

I should finish the design for the under-Ngahe encounter. Aspiring to do some really weird stuff with it. So much you can do with corridors of flesh.

So I'll be honest, and it brings me no pleasure to say this, but this applies to MUDs as well and I have no idea why or how to encourage players to actually read the things in a fully text-based medium. It is becoming a frankly baffling design barrier.

holy shit this is so cool!!

okay I've been seeing a lot of videos lately about puzzle boxes and puzzle tables and shit I think I'm gonna make one. Yolsei-themed puzzle with like a dozen different solutions and prizes. why not!

my goal is to never again launch a new area or challenge for players where I had to leave an idea I liked out because it wasn't worth the time or effort it would have taken to implement. more, better stuff for everyone.

working on the magic codex today. most of this process has frankly been talking through all of the various lore things we've spent the last ~decade and compiling it into something that's readable (and hopefully interesting!) to other people

some of you have never shone a beam of light through a crystal on top of a staff at exactly the right moment of the sun's date and angle to reveal an ancient secret long buried in a forgotten tomb, and it shows

as someone that recently dealt with a catastrophic database failure triggered by an update the ao3 situation makes me feel such sympathy and horror in equal measure

gonna get me this setup for multiboxing MUD events

an important part of my growth as a creator has been striking balance and telling the difference between "yeah I could totally do that if I applied myself" and "oh that is entirely beyond my skills now and maybe forever" #indiedev

building out nested if statements because our progging language doesn't have an and operator. ah,

currently reflecting on ways to convey size and space through text without relying on mechanisms I find frustrating in other games such as artificial time-gating that was really the primary means of creating space in old MUDs like DragonRealms: drop a 20 minute boat ride in the way

having Arkhural, the shuddeni and therefore eyeless deity, whip out a pair of mirrored spectacles and put them on during a scene is maybe one of the funniest things I've ever done in this game to this day

Fire templar has received a big update! It is a strong dps with good group healing and a tempo mechanic. Hope folks have fun with it.

there is a type of roleplayer that really just wants to be doing creative writing without any input but no one ever got them an ao3 account and that's sad

time to do some more really gross horrible writing (my favorite)

I will say the agent-assisted process as a whole works a lot better for formulaic writing. fortunately that is what a lot of RPG/game writing needs to be. I think I could still use it for other kinds but it would demand some more work from me due to the departure from that kind of structure

Any hype asserting entire fields would simply be replaced was wrong IMO including coding agents. LLMs are also useful in creative fields but not in the sense that they replace the artists. I think there is simply less discussion about this because it is a very, very hostile place to be right now.

Spinning up some new interaction NPCs lately. We have a very shuddeni/void-heavy userbase atm so I'm wondering how that'll all play out.

I mean that's just what MUDs are on their own yeah, when you get down to it.

We started setting up Matrix spaces when Discord started in on the age verification stuff. Unfortunately all the Matrix clients and bridges are still pretty mid and missing a lot of features.

I am thinking of revamping both our rules page and our roleplay page. needs refinement after all this time, and there are much better ways to describe both our approach and our limits. I also think I need to start committing the metaplot to the wiki more thoroughly but I am kind of blocked on how