![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinAround the turn of the century, I was really deeply involved in a game making program/community called BYOND. BYOND (Build Your Own Net Dream) started its life as a construction kit for graphical MUDs (multi-user dungeons, the text-based precursors of MMOs).
Now, you might be thinking that the graphical version of the precursor to MMOs is just an MMO. BYOND is a bit more retro. The original engine was entirely tile-based and grounded in the precepts of MUDs. A lot of people's early projects, including mine, followed the MU* model.
These days the engine's capabilities have expanded quite a bit, though it's still 2D tile based at its core.
I'm not a very rigorous programmer and I didn't fully understand what I was doing, so pretty much all of my gamemaking projects eventually collapsed under the weight of buggy, inefficient code.
The most successful of these was a game called Hedgerow Hall. It was what I would now term a "social sandbox roleplaying game"... it used roleplaying game style mechanics, but unlike most CRPGs it didn't have a plot or quests or random monsters. The only characters were ones controlled by players, the only stories were ones that players came up with and acted out.
Essentially, my goal was to make a computer roleplaying game in the sense of "game where you roleplay" and not just "game where you have HP and XP".
In Hedgerow Hall, you took on the role of a semi-anthropomorphic Badger, Fox, Hedgehog, Mouse, Rabbit, Rat, Shrew, or Squirrel... semi-anthropomorphic in that they walk on their hind limbs and can use their forelimbs like arms, but weren't just basically furry human beings with animal tails and ears.
The center of the game world was the titular hall, where you could learn skills from trainers, then went out into the world and collect resources, make crafts, build and decorate a burrow, and so on.
There were some design flaws in things like how combat was integrated into the experience, and some conflicts between how I administrated the server and the expectations of the players, and a lot of long-standing bugs that I had no idea the source of or how to fix, and eventually it stopped being fun for me so I stopped working on it and had the hosted server taken down.
I've never completely stopped thinking about this game, which was one of the real high points of my early adult life... I've sometimes considered redoing it as a text-based MUD or even a pen and paper roleplaying game (though it'd be hard to get the sandbox building or social aspect across there). There were a couple of times I tried my hand at making a new version with graphics, figuring that I had all the graphic assets (such as they were) and I was a more experienced and mature coder now.
I was recently reminded that people still talk about this game, 12 1/2 years later. It's actually possibly my third most well-known work, with Tales of MU being the second and that Batman/Superman Aladdin caption I wrote being the first.
This happened at a time when I was messing around with a sort of unrelated proof-of-concept thing using BYOND, the kind of thing I do as an intellectual exercise from time to time, and I had already been thinking "You know, this would actually work pretty well if I ever revived Hedgerow Hall."
So since late last week and then over this weekend, I've been noodling around with recreating the game. The reason my previous attempts failed, I think, is that I got too ambitious in trying to make the game "modern", more like an MMO crossed with a social media game. Apart from lacking what made the original work, this meant I was back to making up large portions of the game as I went.
What I've been doing this time around is using the original game as a design document, making improvements only where the BYOND engine has improved (supporting pixel-by-pixel movement, for instance, and greater flexibility when it comes to keyboard and mouse controls) or where my greater understanding of how to do what I'm doing allows me to avoid some of the restrictions I worked under the first time.
What I have right now is very simple and couldn't be called a game, though it's the framework for one: there's a magic system, though only the low-level travel/teleportation spells have been filled in. There's a skill system, though only a few skills have been filled in. There's a speech/language system (if someone speaks in a language you don't understand, you see animal noises in place of their text). There's a night/day cycle and the hooks for other calendar based events (e.g., season changes). There's a burrowing system, though you can't do more inside your burrow than dig or fill in a square, or put an arched doorway through it. There's "scrounging" (searching for resources), though not a lot of resources are filled in yet. There's a crafting system, though the only items that can be crafted are a leaf blanket and a torch. The movement system is in, including running and jumping.
BYOND is an object-oriented programming environment, which is why so much of the above is "There's a system for _______, but it only has these few things in it." With the crafting system in place, it takes just a few words of code to define the crafting requirement for any item that is defined in the game. Things like the effects of spells take a bit more hard definition, especially if they don't just buff/debuff something, but once a spell's effects have been defined, I don't have to do anything special to get it hooked into the magic system.
I was working on this this morning between when I woke up and 10, when work started. It's gone pretty well. It's not so far along that I want to shout about it to the heavens, but I'm planning on spending a couple of hours working on it most days, so it would be weird not to mention it. I feel like by the end of the week I'll have a solid idea if it's going somewhere.
Now, you might be thinking that the graphical version of the precursor to MMOs is just an MMO. BYOND is a bit more retro. The original engine was entirely tile-based and grounded in the precepts of MUDs. A lot of people's early projects, including mine, followed the MU* model.
These days the engine's capabilities have expanded quite a bit, though it's still 2D tile based at its core.
I'm not a very rigorous programmer and I didn't fully understand what I was doing, so pretty much all of my gamemaking projects eventually collapsed under the weight of buggy, inefficient code.
The most successful of these was a game called Hedgerow Hall. It was what I would now term a "social sandbox roleplaying game"... it used roleplaying game style mechanics, but unlike most CRPGs it didn't have a plot or quests or random monsters. The only characters were ones controlled by players, the only stories were ones that players came up with and acted out.
Essentially, my goal was to make a computer roleplaying game in the sense of "game where you roleplay" and not just "game where you have HP and XP".
In Hedgerow Hall, you took on the role of a semi-anthropomorphic Badger, Fox, Hedgehog, Mouse, Rabbit, Rat, Shrew, or Squirrel... semi-anthropomorphic in that they walk on their hind limbs and can use their forelimbs like arms, but weren't just basically furry human beings with animal tails and ears.
The center of the game world was the titular hall, where you could learn skills from trainers, then went out into the world and collect resources, make crafts, build and decorate a burrow, and so on.
There were some design flaws in things like how combat was integrated into the experience, and some conflicts between how I administrated the server and the expectations of the players, and a lot of long-standing bugs that I had no idea the source of or how to fix, and eventually it stopped being fun for me so I stopped working on it and had the hosted server taken down.
I've never completely stopped thinking about this game, which was one of the real high points of my early adult life... I've sometimes considered redoing it as a text-based MUD or even a pen and paper roleplaying game (though it'd be hard to get the sandbox building or social aspect across there). There were a couple of times I tried my hand at making a new version with graphics, figuring that I had all the graphic assets (such as they were) and I was a more experienced and mature coder now.
I was recently reminded that people still talk about this game, 12 1/2 years later. It's actually possibly my third most well-known work, with Tales of MU being the second and that Batman/Superman Aladdin caption I wrote being the first.
This happened at a time when I was messing around with a sort of unrelated proof-of-concept thing using BYOND, the kind of thing I do as an intellectual exercise from time to time, and I had already been thinking "You know, this would actually work pretty well if I ever revived Hedgerow Hall."
So since late last week and then over this weekend, I've been noodling around with recreating the game. The reason my previous attempts failed, I think, is that I got too ambitious in trying to make the game "modern", more like an MMO crossed with a social media game. Apart from lacking what made the original work, this meant I was back to making up large portions of the game as I went.
What I've been doing this time around is using the original game as a design document, making improvements only where the BYOND engine has improved (supporting pixel-by-pixel movement, for instance, and greater flexibility when it comes to keyboard and mouse controls) or where my greater understanding of how to do what I'm doing allows me to avoid some of the restrictions I worked under the first time.
What I have right now is very simple and couldn't be called a game, though it's the framework for one: there's a magic system, though only the low-level travel/teleportation spells have been filled in. There's a skill system, though only a few skills have been filled in. There's a speech/language system (if someone speaks in a language you don't understand, you see animal noises in place of their text). There's a night/day cycle and the hooks for other calendar based events (e.g., season changes). There's a burrowing system, though you can't do more inside your burrow than dig or fill in a square, or put an arched doorway through it. There's "scrounging" (searching for resources), though not a lot of resources are filled in yet. There's a crafting system, though the only items that can be crafted are a leaf blanket and a torch. The movement system is in, including running and jumping.
BYOND is an object-oriented programming environment, which is why so much of the above is "There's a system for _______, but it only has these few things in it." With the crafting system in place, it takes just a few words of code to define the crafting requirement for any item that is defined in the game. Things like the effects of spells take a bit more hard definition, especially if they don't just buff/debuff something, but once a spell's effects have been defined, I don't have to do anything special to get it hooked into the magic system.
I was working on this this morning between when I woke up and 10, when work started. It's gone pretty well. It's not so far along that I want to shout about it to the heavens, but I'm planning on spending a couple of hours working on it most days, so it would be weird not to mention it. I feel like by the end of the week I'll have a solid idea if it's going somewhere.