Valve’s “Secret Weapon”, by Game Maker’s Toolkit.

A video about the importance of Playtesting, centered in the experiences of Valve while developing Portal.

We’ve reached the 1000 commits mark in the Hexagon mudlib project, since the first commit in 26 Aug 2014, when we started porting the ccmudlib project to DGD.

Rss/Web feeds have been added (in Rss2 and Atom formats) to the blog, so now you can read the blog contents using the feed aggregator of your choice (like Feedly, The Old Reader, and many more).

Add maldorne.org to your favorite aggregator (web or app) and they should be detected automatically. Just in case, the links are:

• https://maldorne.org/atom.xml
• https://maldorne.org/rss2.xml

Juice it or lose it - a talk by Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho.

A fantastic video for the weekend, about adding some juice to your game, giving it some bells and whistles. Take some ideas from here, for every kind of game, not only the graphical ones.

In an attemp to give some love to the documentation, the installation instructions have been reviewed and updated.

You can take a look on github, and remember to submit an issue if you have a problem or find any error.

Trying to add some more useful information to the web, and adding some documentation, this week I made a timeline of the versions of ccmudlib and Hexagon, and added it to the About page so you can take a look.

Not very game-designy, but is a way of stating the amount of work done during the last years, giving dates and specific versions. Maybe some other time I could add some more information there.

I’ve been playing with the vt100 terminal specification (read some history on the wikipedia, or some very technical specification), and although is not very useful yet, some results can be shown:

Has to be really, really improved, as at the moment everything is recalculated with every message sent to the user, but now we can draw characters (and boxes with content) at any position of the screen. Obviously, this will be optional and configurable per player, as not every mud client is compatible with the vt100 spec.

The worldmap is fake for now, but I’m working on it 😃

Some improvements have been done in the way some ascii/ansi characters are handled, doing extensive use of the new chr() efun, so problems wouldn’t appear with the encodings of the files in the mudlib. Still a work in progress with some things to polish, but seems to be working.

Take a look to the frames handler that renders boxes with text inside if you need more info, in /lib/handlers/frames.c.

Changes and updates to the mudlib in its v21.09 Beregost version. This post will be updated during the autumn and winter:

Player updates

• kill command translated.
• Help about multiple commands reviewed, use help <cmd> to test it.
  • coder/exec
  • coder/exits
  • coder/grep
  • coder/home
  • coder/ls
  • coder/peace
  • coder/sar
  • login/finger
  • login/who
  • player/kill
  • player/look
  • player/prompt
• Some ascii/ansi improvements using box drawing characters.

Developer updates

• Tinkering with the vt100 terminal.

Changes and updates to the mudlib in its v20.09 Anduin version. This post will be updated during the summer:

Player updates

• Aliases reviewed and working.
• clear command working.

Developer updates