Having never designed a graphical game previous to Earth Eternal, I am finding the experience to be an education. Although there’s no fundamental difference between designing EE and our text MUDs, the restrictions we’re under on EE are incredible. For someone used to a level of design freedom that even the best-funded graphical projects can only envy, moving to a self-funded (read “small budget”) graphical project is quite the difference.

For instance, I’m reviewing the design for EE’s combat system tonight, which I wrote a few months ago. Something like a knock-down ability that wouldn’t make you think twice in text becomes the subject of serious thought. If you have a knock-down ability, any creature that it can be used on needs an appropriate animation. That gets very expensive, and acts as a multiplier for all new content in terms of cost. The nature of our game doesn’t permit CPU or GPU-intensive operations like ragdoll physics, so procedural solutions to this kind of thing are out for us. In text, the equivalent of a single animation is only one or two sentences of written word. In the time an animator can do one good animation to represent a game action, I can write 100 text actions. That’s only one example, as well. Equivalent savings are to be found in the 3d models, in the UI, and so on.

I’m not crazy of course. I don’t believe that we’re at the dawn of a new age of text MUDs. Text MUDs aren’t dying and they aren’t going to die anytime in the forseeable future, but they’re also not going to sweep the world. Graphical representations are simply friendlier, and there’s no getting around that. Regardless of that though, it’s simply more fun to design for text. The creative impulses one can induldge in text dwarf what are possible graphically with any budget, much less our budget.