Following on from my post looking at D&D style game systems I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a MUD that uses a 2D graphical battlemap instead of text to represent the world. Maps would be covered with a square grid and characters would be represented by tokens which would move around the map in real time.
This is the kind of thing I’m thinking of:
I don’t know what client that is but it’s some kind of virtual tabletop program that’s used to play pen and paper role-playing games over the internet. Obviously a lot of the stuff in that screenshot wouldn’t be relevant, but it’s just an illustration of the kind of thing I’m thinking of and not meant to be an exact model.
The game would use a custom client and there wouldn’t be any support for existing MUD clients, although I guess you could probably do a lot of it in MUSHclient (and maybe Mudlet too?) if you were that way inclined (I’m not).
As it’s a custom client I’m just sending raw data from the server rather than formatted text for a terminal window. I’m using a very simple list based data format which has been very easy to bolt onto Nakedmud. It’s based on a spec that was originally posted to mudstandards.org by Jon Lambert (the site is down as I write this but I’ll try and dig up the file).
So far I’ve done some minor tinkering with Nakedmud so that each map is its own zone with a single coordinate system. I think I’d only need to store the coordinates that are traversable in each zone and movement can be handled very simply by assuming that you can always move to adjacent traversable coordinates (with some allowance for doors?) A room will represent a group of coordinates which are all visible to each other and areas of interest are handled by having rooms overlap with characters receiving messages from every room they are in. Hopefully this will allow me to use as much of the existing Nakedmud infrastructure as possible and avoid the need to calculate areas of interest and lines of sight.
I haven’t decided on the best way to handle long distance travel yet but one idea would be to use a larger scale map where you move between points of interest that each have their own tactical map. You could also add in a chance for random encounters using some standard tactical maps such as a campsite, road, forest clearing etc.
Being based on a D&D style system the game would have plenty of hack and slash but I’d want it to be roleplay enforced as well, possibly even with permadeath. Content wise I’d love to do some conversions of existing Pathfinder or D&D modules or campaigns, copyright permitting. I also have a load of graphical map tiles that could probably be used to whip up some Roguelike-like random dungeons.
There’s scope within the D&D rules for dominion rulership, mass warfare, crafting, politics and all that good stuff too, although the main focus of the game would be on adventuring (at least while levelling). I’d also want to keep it casual friendly so people didn’t feel like they had to grind or spend a lot of time playing just to keep up.
So, does anyone think there is an audience for this kind of game? Would it be more likely to appeal to Roguelike or tabletop D&D fans maybe? This would be a completely non-commercial project.
bcdev.design.blog 