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the end of may
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- Written by: chop
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My brain does this thing where it is constantly trying to find new things to do - and then, of course, to hyper-fixate on. So for me, it's always a struggle to attempt to keep it focused on things within the current field I am aiming to pursue. I'm not always successful at this (more often than not I am definitely not successful at this), but let's run through the (potential) projects I'm trying to arrange on my overly-crowded plate.
First let's talk about the area I want to focus on in general. I'm trying to tackle more programming and game design these days. They are both things that I enjoy doing and have a lot of fun with. I'd even go out on a limb here and say they're things that I am "good" at. They definitely hand out a lot of dopamine, and isn't that what we're all really chasing these days?
Anyway, my plan at the moment is to approach this all like a total noob (using my experience thusfar to help avoid pitfalls and stuff like that). At the end of the day though, my "problem" with all of this tends to be that the things I would love to work on and make would almost never generate any sort of meaningful income. At this point though, I'm kind of rambling, so let's take a look at the individual "big ideas" in front of me at the moment.
For starters - for decades now (man, that's scary to type) I've wanted to make a MUD (a text-based, multiplayer RPG), something that almost never "makes money" and is pretty much always a passion project. This is something I've actually begun doing with my experimentation with the Evennia engine/library, so there will definitely be more on this in the not-too-distant future.
The game-related stuff definitely doesn't end there though, I'm also interested in indie game development. Another field that is notoriously difficult to do profitably.
Thankfully, I find myself in a place of extreme privilege. I am both a stay-at-home parent and a U.S. military veteran on disability. So I am in a somewhat unique place where I don't *NEED* to generate income - allowing me to be in a position where all I care about personally is recouping costs. Anything else would just be a delightful bonus.
Which brings me to the third thing, and by far the most complicated of the ideas. But it keeps coming around again and again to tempt me, so I think I'm going to give it a shot. iOS (and somewhat MacOS) is (are) missing a decent, native MUD client. Something that would be a very, very niche market at best.
As things stand, the only real MUD client for iOS - MUDRammer - got pulled from the iOS App Store recently. Leaving a complete void in the market. New users cannot even find it on the store, much less download it. My understanding of the situation (based entirely on 3rd party hearsay) is that the app has not been modernized enough and got pulled until it is. But who knows when that will be (with my luck it'll happen like right after I post this), or even if it will ever happen. Looking at their github page, MUDRammer supports back to like iOS 7.0 (at the time of writing, my phone is on iOS 18.4.1) - so there are potentially chunks of code that are more than a decade old.
When we turn to MacOS, there are really 2 major options I've seen/used: Mudlet and Atlantis.
Mudlet is pretty damn full featured and is the client of choice for a lot of people. I even use it at the moment due to its GCMP integration with my game of choice (ThresholdRPG). It's multiplatform, so it's something of a shared experience no matter whether you're on Windows, MacOS, or Linux. But it doesn't support iOS at all.
Atlantis is one that I've enjoyed a lot over the years and is a pretty solid choice for a client that doesn't have all the bells and whistles / clutter / bloat.
So here I sit wanting to try and build a MUD Client that will work on both iOS and MacOS. Something that can take advantage of some of the native Apple integrations like icloud and other things that have cropped up in the last decade.
So the way I see it, there are three choices of where to start:
1) Take Mudlet and see if I can port it over to iOS and how we can make things work from there.
2) Fork MUDRammer and try to build off of its base. Modernize things into something that fits my vision.
3) Go at this whole thing from scratch.
Obviously, this third one is the one I am leaning toward. MUDRammer is open source, so I can fork it no matter what and poke around the source code to see how it does things. Use it for inspiration and starting off points for how to implement features. But I do think that the only way to truly craft what I have in my mind is to start with a blank slate and build things up from there.
My hope is to document it all along the way in various different ways. Share the journey and the lessons learned. I hope you'll stick around with me and find out. Here goes nothing.