The web front-end I talked about last time was neat and all, but it was clunky, and still fell short of making a game easy to set up for someone with no coding experience.
I found myself circling back to an idea I first touched on months ago: What would a MU* look like if you designed it today for the web?
Here’s my latest attempt:
(Note: This article references a prototype that no longer exists. Check out the AresMUSH demo game for an updated example.)
The site is just a mockup to show what a game might look like. You can navigate to different screens, but a lot of the buttons don’t actually do anything.
It’s basically a MU and game wiki all in one, drawing inspiration from Play-By-Post games, Storium, graphical MUDs, and some sketches shared with me by Skinny Thicket@MSB.
It’s a bit of a different experience. Instead of gameplay being centered around a character moving through the grid, it’s centered around scenes.
You’d start a scene and either invite people to it or declare it public for anyone to join. The scene page (which looks remarkably like a MU wiki log page) would update live as people contributed to it. When the scene ends, you can keep it private or share it on the scene archive.
Chargen is also entirely on the web, allowing you to auto-generate things like faction lists and character profile pages.
Notably missing from all of this is live chat (channels and pages). Chat is the one area where I think a MU* would be better served with an off-the-shelf tool. Discord is ridiculously simple to set up, and I actually think there’s some merit to having a central Ares Discord server with sub-channels for different games. It might help the community, and allow you to talk to all of your MU friends no matter which game they happen to be logged into at that moment.
Certainly there are similarities between this and a Play-By-Post game, but there’s one important difference: time passes in the game in parallel to RL.
While you could certainly use do backscenes or multi-day scenes in this style of game, the default mode of gameplay is still “live”. It’s intended to be fast-paced.
So what does all this mean for AresMUSH? I haven’t decided yet. There’s a lot of allure to designing something that takes a bigger step forward. Something my kids might actually play someday. But it would delay the development timetable and I’m not convinced people would actually play it.
I’m curious to hear what you think.