My MUD project has in some ways been an albatross to me. In my career as a software engineer I've built many things, some much more complex than this one. I've never had as much trouble on a project than I've had on this MUD, and for many years I couldn't understand why. It was only in the past few years that I figured it out. It's the requirements. 1/8
At school and work the requirements for a project are often presented by someone else. As my career has progressed I have become more and more responsible for discovering requirements and refining them from "business speak" into "engineer speak" but the fact remains that a typical project is defined by some concrete and understandable business need, and while requirements do tend to shift it is exceedingly rare for a business to simply say "go build a game" with no other direction. 2/8
A personal project sometimes has the same characteristics. "I need to change the colors on my LED lightbulbs in time with my cat's purring" or "I need to detect and analyze which of my neighbors has the best WiFi to leech". But games, particularly from people who are not experienced game designers, are much squishier. Looking back, I realize I unwittingly fell into the same trap that many kids do: 3/8
"I want to simulate everything in the universe down to each subatomic particle and I want it to run on my Raspberry Pi in 8K at 700 FPS."
Ok, not quite that bad. But close. 4/8
I wanted all the best parts of my favorite MUDs, but with better AI and physics and realistic geometry and more intricate magic systems and procedurally generated everything and, and, and... To make matters worse, I was carrying conflicting ideas with me. I'd settle on one way of representing rooms (for example), implement it, then come back a few weeks later and tear it out again so I could do it completely differently. 5/8
There is no manager to impose deadlines and no teammates to tell me to stop because it's good enough. Thus, there is a certain point relatively early on in the game's development that in 20 years I have never made it past. 6/8
I only became aware of this problem in the past couple of years and I only really started to address it on this current instance of Agony Forge when I started over from scratch last year. This time I have spent more time up front making these kinds of decisions about how my game world should work and writing them down so I stick with them. 7/8
I'm also writing down the conflicting ideas and putting them aside so that perhaps they can find their way into a different game some day in the future. We'll soon find out if this time I will finally make it past the point where I've gotten stuck every time before. Fingers crossed, cause I've got at least three MUDs worth of ideas. 8/8