Greetings, adventurers! Welcome to issue 0x02 of The MUD Coders Guild newsletter (that's right, we're

The MUD Coders Guild 💾 A monthly digest of text-based game development successes, failures, inspiration, and anecdotes from the members of The MUD Coders Guild.

Greetings, adventurers! Welcome to issue 0x02 of The MUD Coders Guild newsletter (that’s right, we’re numbering in hexadecimal, because we can)! I don’t have much of a lead-in this month, but I did want to take a minute and thank everyone in TMCG (and our friends over at r/MUD ) for their amazing support for this little corner of the internet. Being able to come together over our collective love of this particular genre of text-based games is something that I am grateful for every day. Thank you!



Zach

> notes

Combat… It Still Isn't Very Simple mudcoders.com – Share I’ve always been big on giving credit to where I stole ideas from, and back then the primary driver for combat design for me was this: River City Ransom (RCR). A seminal street brawling game for a…

Main Hand: Apple; Off-Hand: Orange mudcoders.com – Share I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that most RPGs are themed by swords and sorcery; we’re all swimming in the ocean of Tolkein’s legacy and medieval fantasy. It’s easy to get stuck in the idea of…

> open source

neuro github.com – Share Neuro is a Websocket MUD client for the Ranvier MUD game engine, built by TMCG community member @shawncplus.



fluxspace github.com – Share Fluxspace is a work-in-progress Elixir MUD Engine by TMCG community member @vy.



ArchaicQuest github.com – Share ArchaicQuest is a browser-based MUD engine built in C# by TMCG community member @liam.



cool-retro-term github.com – Share MUDs are, by definition, not very graphical. But just because we work in text that doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate quality text-based art. Cool-retro-term is a gorgeous terminal emulator that mimics the look of old cathode displays, making for the world’s greatest screenshots.



NATS nats.io – Share NATS is a high performance messaging system that acts as a distributed messaging queue for cloud native applications, IoT device messaging, and microservices architecture. TMCG community member @wot shared this with the plan to distribute zone, room, and combat messages to clients.

> inventory

stunnel www.stunnel.org – Share Stunnel is a multiplatform proxy that can be used to encrypt arbitrary TCP connections with SSL/TLS.



REXPaint www.gridsagegames.com – Share MUDs and ASCII art go together like bacon and more bacon. Unfortunately, ASCII art is hard. Enter REXPaint, an amazing ASCII art editor by Grid Sage Games.

> train int

The 30-Day Code Quality Challenge www.codequalitychallenge.com – Share If you’ve ever taken a look at the code from any DikuMUD derivative, then you know that MUD code can get messy. The 30-day code quality challenge is a… well… 30 day challenge to improve the quality of your code. Nuff said.



> cast 'inspiration'

Medieval Demographics Made Easy www222.pair.com – Share How many people in a medieval city? How many taverns? How many castles in those hills? This article will let you know.

Worlds sazzer-worlds.now.sh – Share TMCG member @sazzer created this awesome fictional world encyclopedia to help inspire our own world-building efforts.



Skyrim Rendered in Text medium.com – Share This mad genius did an excellent write-up of what a text-based demake of Skyrim would look like. There’s not a lot more to say about it other than read the article, it’s fascinating.



TwinMUD www.reddit.com – Share TMCG member @swiftausterity documents every design idea he has for his own MUD in a special subreddit. There’s a lot of incredible inspiration here for text-based game designers.



> afk

ArchaicQuest: First Impressions www.youtube.com – Share Our first stream! Okay, technically it’s the first streamed playthrough and review of a TMCG member game—ArchaicQuest by @liam—but still, it’s very exciting!



Roguelike Radio Episode 141: MUDs www.roguelikeradio.com – Share If you’ve ever wanted to learn more about the past, present, and future of Multi-User Dungeons, this episode of Roguelike Radio is a must-listen. It features the vocal stylings of the grandfather of MUDs himself: Richard Bartle.



> quit

Adde parvum parvo magnus acervus erit. [Add little to little and there will be a big pile]

The MUD Coders Guild is a community for people with a passion for creating text-based games. Join us on Slack!

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