It’s hard to believe, but Mudlet 4 is here! We’ve put in a lot of work to make Mudlet fit for use around the world, and are happy with the adoption that’s picking up.

Still, we’re not resting on our laurels, so here’s our roadmap for Mudlet 5!

Hi, we’ve been building Mudlet for 10+ years and we don’t believe that MUDs are dying, let’s get started.

Theme for Mudlet 5: First-time player experience

 

New MUD player experience

You can probably understand how difficult it is for most people to get into MUDs – some hand holding and explanation of how things work can go a really long way to a new player.

What if the said player doesn’t have anyone to show her the ropes?

To help grow the genre, we can’t start with an expectation that everyone comes in via friends: that’s not scalable. We need to help make sure that if you’re a new player, there’s a good introduction waiting for you which will walk you through the basics and help you to understand what’s happening.

This introduction will cover the basic concept of MUDs: 

• You send a command, and you get a text response back
• What is a room like? 
• How do you talk in the game? 

It will of course be designed with the first time player in mind, but may even be useful to long time MUD players as well. 

 

Built-in snippets

We believe in the power of copy/pasting, so we already provide tons of examples in our manual for people to pick up and use. What if those examples were accessible right inside Mudlet? Even better 😉

For Mudlet 5 we’d like to have both code snippets and examples on how to setup Mudlet triggers & aliases right in the client.

 

A gaming interface out of the box

We’ve gone for many years without any kind of gaming interface out of the box… Connecting to a new game will mostly just show you plain text, but the results are clear: When new players see gorgeous, comprehensive UIs like StickMUDs, Midkemia’s or IREs, they are blown away. 

To this end, to be more newbie-friendly, and more welcoming into the whole world of text adventures, Mudlet will provide a default, extensible interface out of the box for many games out there.

It should not get in the way of minimalism, however: Just like now, you should be able to configure Mudlet down to just the text window and an input line.

We’re thinking that this interface will cover the obvious things like health & mana, etc. gauges, a mapper, a tabbed chat window. More ideas from you are welcome on that front.

An obvious difficulty from a coding standpoint of course would be to capture the data for the interface from the multitude of different ways in which games can format it. Still, we’re looking forward to the challenge, and we’d love your help in adapting it to your game!

 

Package manager

Combining the ideas above leads us to a reasonable conclusion: Per-game packages which enhance your gameplay should be easy to install in a snap, right from the client.

We would like to provide the ability to download, install, and update Mudlet packages out of the box, similar to what you may know from apt or yum for Linux. 

This way, install instructions could be as simple as ‘mudpack install MyGUI’ and updating like ‘mudpack update’. This can really simplify getting things up and running for new players and will make copy/paste instructions even more effective.

If anyone knows a slim package manager we could use out of the box for Mudlet, let us know. We’d love to not have to reinvent this 😁

 

Recap

4 goals to achieve before we arrive at Mudlet 5:

• Built-in snippets (but don’t lose our help in the manual)
• Default interface (bars, mapper, tabbed chat)
• MUD first-time player experience (introduction to text games)
• Package manager

Want to join in on helping us? Looking for resume experience? Bored at work? Meet us in Discord 😎.

-Mudlet team.