by belford » Tue May 14, 2013 12:30 pm
Some of my thoughts on this project come from my "Better Instancing" post from 2008. Some were sparked Alahmnat's recent (sporadic) blog posts, such as "A More Welcoming Beginning". Some are new.
I am not going to rehash those posts, just describe the key principles of what I am doing.
- We are here to write new Ages, explore them, share them, and enjoy them -- alone or together. All else follows from that.
- The minimum number of "special" Ages (those important for game-mechanical reasons). MOUL has too many: the Cleft (the start world), Relto (the home world), the Nexus (for link-access), Ae'gura (the global home base), the Neighborhood (a group home base), etc. All of these functions should come from *player-created* Ages.
- Anyhow, we don't want to replicate Relto, or the Cleft, or any other MOUL location. Respect Cyan's intentions for the areas they built; we can build our own.
- Everybody should have access to Age creation. (See point one.) Building must be easy. Building must be *incremental* -- you should be able to enter a room as soon as you create it, and then add details one at a time. If someone finds a bug, you should be able to fix it "in place".
- All text. Including illustrations in a text world is probably easy -- HTML can do that -- but I don't want that to be the norm. You shouldn't feel obligated to create nice graphics before other people take your Age seriously.
- Minimal gatekeeping. If you create an Age, you should be able to walk up to someone and share it -- no need for an administrator to install it or add a linking book somewhere official.
- Instancing is simple and transparent. It should be possible (and easy) to create a private Age, but it should also be easy for players to gather in (almost) any Age.
- "Time to D'ni" (for new players) should be a couple of minutes at worst.
I have several pages of notes on how this will all work (and I've built a large fraction of it). However, here's a quick overview:
You start, as a new player, in a "Surface" world, in a location called "Information Booth". The description notes that you found this booth in an obscure corner of a shopping mall, somewhere near where you live. (Technically it is a "solo world", meaning always private-instanced and unshareable.)
This "Surface" age has just two locations: the Information Booth, and a Changing Room (wardrobe, for customizing your textual appearance). We won't draw the player's attention to the Changing Room right away. Instead, we'll have a short intro sequence in which you pick up a linking booklet and a ki. (This acts as a micro-tutorial on the interface -- how to click on a link.)
Once you have those two items, your screen has the ki display, which includes the contents of your linking booklet. For a new player, that's one link: "Seltani District". The instructions say to click on that. Poof, you are in the Cavern.
Seltani District is a shared area on the edge of the Cavern lake. This would *initially* be the "hub" space -- it would have orientation information for new players, a location for players to hang out and chat, another location with a collection of linking books to other worlds.
I stress "initially" because I don't want the District to become a bottleneck. If it gets crowded, people will build more hanging-out areas -- could be in the Cavern or out of it. (The engine will not distinguish between "in Cavern", "on Earth", or "other Ages".)
Again, players can share links directly, so an Age doesn't have to be installed in Seltani in order to be "official". The Book Gallery in Seltani will be the easiest place to find links *at first* -- but I hope there will soon be groups of players building libraries and curating their own collections.
As I said, I don't intend to replicate the Nexus. Your collection of links is your linking booklet; you carry it everywhere. If that becomes unwieldy, create a private Age with a bookshelf and shift some of your links to that.
(I have already constructed the Info Booth and Seltani, to the point where you can walk around them, look at the scenery, and link back and forth. Seltani only has a couple of linking books so far; obviously this will grow as I make more progress.)
(The system is currently stable for walking around and chatting, but there's no scripting system. I have several Ages plotted out that require some level of scripting before I can start them.)