"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

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

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

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

@Killthorne OIC! Thanks! :)

@Killthorne Not familiar with ALFA. What is/was it?

@Killthorne Nice! I remember NWN. Played it a lot but never got into playing online. It was really impressive for its time and had a lot of staying power. Back then we were all in high school and preferred good old paper/pencil D&D though.

@ChippySuave The key is getting Bloomberg and Steyer to start spending their money to advertise on FOX and present evidence to the GOP constituents that way. I have to believe there is some threshold where they will turn on Trump if they start seeing the stuff we have seen, and if the voters turn the Senators will too. But they aren’t seeing any of it.

Feedback, questions and conversation are very much appreciated. The main thing I hope to gain for myself from doing this is to build up a community. I find it difficult to stay motivated and keep working on my projects all alone. Having some new friends to talk about software development with would be really nice. 3/3

I'm going to start sharing some of the things I've learned about software and game development both from working on my MUD project and over a professional career of more than 20 years. I don't claim to know everything, but I hope that some of my experiences may resonate with other folks out there. Maybe it'll even help somebody who is struggling with their own project. 2/3

Agony Forge is the name of my current game project. It's a web based take on a MUD (Multi User Dungeon). If you're not familiar, MUDs were text based multiplayer games that ran over telnet and were popular in the 90s. They were the inspiration for MMORPGs, to the extent that some of the text in EverQuest was lifted directly from one of the most popular MUD codebases. So I've been working on this thing in one form or another since high school. 1/3

@Sandy_Starzy I’m going to for sure! Bedtime is in about an hour!

I have to DVR Maddow and watch after the kiddo’s bedtime but it sure sounds like it’s worth a look tonight.😎