Where do I begin? (repost)

This is a repost of an article I originally wrote for the Imaginary Realities e-zine, Volume 7, issue 3 back in 2015. It's not Evennia-specific but meant for a wider audience interested in making a text-based multiplayer game (MUD/MU*). Since IR is no longer active, I repost it here with only some minor cleanup.

Where do I begin?

by Griatch 

(image from deviantart.com/griatch-art)

When a new user has everything installed and drops into Evennia’s IRC support chat or mailing list, there is one question that we regularly get in various variations:

“Where do I begin?”


How to actually start down that long road towards your own game is an important question. Unfortunately it has no one-size-fits-all answer. So it usually leads to a series of counter-questions. In this article I will try to (without being Evennia-specific) pose those questions in a way that would not fit in a chat window. 

 

What is your motivation for doing this?

So you want to make a game. First you need to make a few things clear to yourself.

Making a multiplayer online game is a big undertaking. You will (if you are like most of us) be doing it as a hobby, without getting paid. And you’ll be doing it for a long time.

So the very first thing you should ask yourself (and your team, if you have any) is why am I doing this? Do some soul-searching here. Here are some possible answers: 

• I want to earn recognition and fame from my online community and/or among my friends.
• I want to build the game so I can play and enjoy it myself.
• I want to build the same game I already play but without the bad people.
• I want to create a game so that I can control it and be the head honcho.
• A friend or online acquaintance talked me into working on it.
• I work on this because I’m paid to (wow!)
• I only build this for my own benefit or to see if I can pull it off.
• I want to create something to give back to the community I love.
• I want to use this project as a stepping-stone towards other projects (like a career in game design or programming).
• I am interested in coding or server and network architectures, making a MUD just seems to be a good way to teach myself. 
• I want to build a commercial game and earn money.
• I want to fulfill a life-long dream of game making.
  

There are many other possibilities. How “solid” your answer is for a long-term development project is up to you. The important point is that you ask yourself the question.


Answering this question you may find that you should not start a new project - maybe it’s better to build on or help improve something that already exists. Maybe you find you are more of a game engine developer than a game designer. Some answers may also suggest that you are driven by emotions of revenge or disconcert - emotions that may have abated later when the project most needs your enthusiasm and motivation.


If your aim is to earn money your design goals may well be very different from those of a person who only builds for their own benefit.


Whichever your motivation, you should at least have it clear in your own mind. It’s worth to make sure your eventual team is on the same page too.

What are your skills?

 

Once you have your motivations straight you need to take stock of your own skills and the skills available in your team, if you have one.

Your game will have two principal components and you will need skills to cater for both:
 

• The game engine (“the code base”)
• The assets created for using the game engine (“the game world”)
  

The game engine

 

The game engine is maintained and modified by programmers (coders). It represents the infrastructure that runs the game - the network code, the protocol support, the handling of commands, scripting and data storage.


Creating your game engine from scratch can be a worthwhile and rewarding endeavour. It is however not a small one and if your main goal is to create a running game I would recommend building on an existing engine. It’s worth to take your time and do your research here. Searching the net and various MUD sites will bring you a slew of options. I will give some things to look for here.


Whereas some engines/code bases offer a lot of pre-existing coded systems, there is no denying that your team will always need someone who either already knows some basic programming or is willing to learn it.

When judging which engine you want to use, consider:

• The engine’s community - hang out in the community/forums/chat surrounding the respective engine. Expect to need to ask a lot of “stupid” questions as you start developing (hint: no question is stupid). Is this a community in which you would feel comfortable doing so?
• Active development - is the code base actively maintained? If there are bugs in the engine, does it seem likely they will be fixed upstream or will you be patching bugs yourself? Or alternatively, are there many active users that can help you out with known quirks?
• Other available documentation - does the engine come with a manual? Are there online tutorials or other help resources to read?
• Which language is the engine coded in? What is it scripted in? Do you or your team already know this language or are you willing to learn it? 
• If you don’t know the language, do a few beginner tutorial so that you can at least vaguely recognize the syntax. Does the engine’s code seem easy to read and well documented? If the engine is poorly documented, the time of development may rise dramatically. 
• Something to remember here is that computers of today are very powerful. And while scaling may be interesting if your game really takes off, a text game is, for the most part, not very demanding. So I’d recommend you pick your language and engine not primarily based on performance but on what you feel comfortable and productive working with. 
• What is the engine’s license? This is mainly important if you plan to ever earn money with your game. Some common engines explicitly forbid commercial use.
  

Asset creation

 

Compared to the level of work needed to produce professional graphics for an MMORPG, detailed text assets for a mud are cheap to create. This is one of the many reasons muds are so well suited for a small team.


This is not to say that making “professional” text content is easy though. Knowing how to write imaginative and grammatically correct prose is only the minimal starting requirement. A good asset-creator (traditionally called a “builder”) must also be able to utilize the tools of the game engine to its fullest in order to script events, make quests, triggers and interactive, interesting environments.


Some game engines will offer generic online building tools while others will depend on the coders to create tools specific for their game. What you go for may be influenced by just how technically savvy your builders are and what skills they are willing to pick up along the way.


Your team’s in-house builders will be the first ones to actually “use” your game framework and build tools. They will stumble on all the bugs. This means that you need people who are just not “artsy” or “good with words”. Assuming coders and builders are not the same people, builders need to be able to collaborate well and give clear and concise feedback.

 

So, where do I begin?

Right, after all this soul-searching and skill-inventory-checking, let’s go back to the original question. And maybe you’ll find that you have a better feeling for the answer yourself already:

• If you are learning a new programming language, you should follow basic tutorials so that you can read, understand and replicate example code without being completely in the dark.
• If you have decided on your game engine you should dive into its manual and basic tutorials. Also make sure to introduce yourself to its community so you can get as much help as possible. 
• If the game engine offers tutorials on making some small example game, do that carefully. Even if the resulting demo game has nothing to do with what you aim to build. If there are no tutorials maybe you can instead find a full example code that you can examine in the same way. Not only will this give you a better understanding of how parts of the engine hangs together, it will also give you ideas for what you can do with it. If something is surprisingly easy to do, you might even be able to expand your plans! 
• If your game engine comes with pre-made game tools or building commands, the builders can start getting familiar with it. But keep in mind that these will not reflect the full capabilities of the game - your game is not yet built! So don’t set builders off to build large zone projects at this point. If they are building anything at all, it should be small test areas in order to agree on a homogenous form, mood and literary style.
  

With a few tutorials and game examples under your belt you are ready to start some preliminary coding-tests of your own. You won’t be making a full game yet! Working without a step-by-step tutorial will give you an idea of just how easy or hard this stuff is to figure out in practice at your current skill level, chosen game engine and language. Make ample use of any manuals, help channels or other resources you can find - anything you will also have access to when you code the real thing. This allows you to judge the quality and usefulness of those resources at the same time. 

You or any builders may also get some building exercise here, using the commands and objects you create for simple testing. Here is a list of things to try out (you should be able to do these in any game engine worth its salt):

• Change some phrasing in the output of an already existing command.
• Make a new command and add it to the game engine. Make it just echo back whatever argument you give it. 
• Code an object that echoes “tick” to everyone at its location every 20 seconds.
• Make a new command that creates new ticking objects where you are, but with a name given by you. 
• Make a room whose description changes every time you enter it.
• Make an object that deletes itself when its “health” property is changed to zero. 
• Make an “attack” command that randomly reduces the “health” property of a target object until it deletes itself.
• These are all simple things but it should give you an idea of what your chosen game engine is capable of and, most importantly, where to find help when you get stuck. If you can’t get past this step even with help you might need to go back and read up on the programming bit some more. Or maybe you should consider an easier game engine.
  
  

What is your scope?

We are now past the “things to do first”. Welcome to the things you do later.


To reiterate, at this point you should have pondered why you are doing this and made an inventory of your available skills. You have gotten a first taste of the kind of coding work you will need to do and what that entails. You have built a few things to see how that works. Maybe you even changed game engine somewhere in the middle. Still ready to roll? Excellent.


You should now hopefully have enough information to be able to realistically set the scope of your game.


Everyone wants to make the best game ever. You want a whole world simulated in minute detail with next-generation artificial intelligence. You want instant action that puts Hollywood to shame and emergent storytelling worthy of Shakespeare.


It’s okay to dream big, but your first goal now is to get something out. Something that players can actually connect to and give feedback on. Having players enjoying an early version of your game is a great motivational boost in itself, you should try to reach that stage quickly. You are aiming for a first version, not the ultimate version. All online mmo:s keep improving the game after release, that’s the name of the game. 

So keep your grand plans in mind but limit your scope for your first release. For a group of hobbyist developers (which is, frankly what almost all MU* development teams are) your motivational time is precious. You are likely not getting paid during development which means that it’s imperative that you set out to create something you are capable of finishing while still having fun. Adjust the scope to fit this time. If you run out of steam before this time you’ll know you went for too big a scope.

How to continue from here?

How to progress is depending on your preference. Some prefer to just jump straight into coding and figure out things as they go. It's not a bad idea to to sit down and plan a little first though - and remember that you want a first version of your game at this point, not the final, ultimate version. 

 

This is beyond the first question asked in this article (which is long enough as it is) but I have written about this process in Evennia’s game planning documentation. This reiterates some aspects of this article while expanding on others. 

… But in the end, remember that what kills a hobby game project will usually be your own lack of motivation. So do whatever you can to keep that motivation burning strong! Even if it means deviating from what you read in articles like this one. Just get that game out there, whichever way works best for you.

Griatch is the lead developer of Evennia, 

the MU* creation library.

Spring updates while trying to stay healthy

So, spring grows nearer for those of us on the Northern hemisphere. With everyone hopefully hunkered down and safe from the Covid-19 pandemic, I thought it overdue to make another dev blog for the progress of Evennia, the Python MU*-creation system.


The last few months have seen primarily bug fixing on the Evennia front, but it also has seen an uptick of PRs from the community and the re-opening of the develop branch in earnest. There is still quite a lot of work to do before we can add that extra 0.1 and go from version 0.9 to 1.0.

What's in a version?

For me personally, I never put much stock in the notion of versions. Evennia didn't even have versions until a few years back: We used to just have a rolling git release. But eventually it became clear that our user base was big enough that we needed to more clearly separate major (and possibly breaking) updates from what came before. So I started versioning at Evennia 0.5 and have had roughly a new release every year since (not a plan or a promise, it just happened to turn out that way).

Evennia has been useful (and been used) for game development for many years already. But there is no denying that a 1.x label tends to convey more confidence in a system than a 0.x label, that's just the way things are. So while the new version is still quite some way off, there are a bunch of changes and improvements that we want to do in this release to mark the version change in a good way.

Documentation changes

Our documentation will move away from our trusty Github wiki. Instead we will convert the wiki into a static github page built from sources inside evennia/docs/.

The advantage of the wiki is that it is a very low entry for people to contribute and fix things using Github's editing system. We have had a lot of use of this over the years and the wiki has served us well. The drawbacks are starting to get ever more noticeable, however:

• Whereas the wiki is itself version-controlled, we cannot show multiple versions of the wiki at the same time. This makes it hard to update the documentation at the same time as non-released code is being written. This is probably my main reason for doing the change.
• The wiki today consists of some 200+ pages. It is hard to get an overview of what is where and what needs to be updated. 
• The wiki word-search functionality is not really great.
• It's impossible to review changes before they go live, to check consistency and style. This has led to some documentation pages overlapping.
• Building the documentation to local HTML or PDF is an archaic process that I doubt anyone but me has done with any regularity. 

The change so far planned is to switch to the Sphinx documentation build-system (same as Python/Django etc is using). We will use it with extensions that allows us to still use Markdown like in the old wiki. This also allows us to build a more comprehensive (and pretty) API documentation of the entire library. We have more options to add comprehensive online search functionality in this solution as well.

Furthermore, will hopefully be able to set it up so that we can maintain and publish separate documentations for each forthcoming release. That is, you should be able to read the docs for 1.0, 1.1 or the latest master development as you like (similarly to how Django does it, although probably not as fancy from the onset). 

This means that contributions to the documentation will be done as PRs through GitHub, just like when contributing any other code. While this does add a little more of a hurdle to contributions, hopefully the benefits will far outweigh those. Building the docs locally will not require a running Evennia server (unless you want the api docs) and we will try to set everything up for to make it easy to contribute.

Many of the details around the docs are still up in the air. This is still very much work-in-progress, like everything else.

Work with this has started in the static-file-docs branch of Evennia. But we have not closed the wiki either - the two will exist in parallel for now.

PyPi

As mentioned before,  we will finally start to distribute Evennia via PyPi (the Python Package Index) - that is, you will be able to run `pip install evennia`. Using GIT will no longer be a requirement to get started.

Considering how quickly people in open-source throw up their three lines of code on PyPi these days, it may be surprising Evennia is not already on PyPi. I have however felt that reading and referencing the highly-commented code is a big part and requirement for getting the most out of the library.

With the new documentation system, this would improve. And you can of course still use git and follow master branch like the good ol' days if you want!

Web Admin improvements

For the longest time, the Django-admin component has been somewhat on the back-burner. With the help of community contributors, this is improving so you will be able to do more work the Admin GUI related to creating and managing objects, tie puppets to Accounts etc.

API improvements 

Whereas the last few months have been mostly spent fixing lingering bugs, one thing planned for version 1.0 is a general cleanup of legacy strangeness in the API. For example, certain methods can return a list or a single object depending situation, which makes it hard to generalize. There are a lot of small quirks like that which we hope to address and make more consistent.

There has also been a recent flurry of contributor PRs intended to help decouple Evennia's systems and make them easier to replace for those inclined to do so. Many of this is still being worked on, but it's likely you'll be able to replace many more "core" components for 1.0 with your own variations without doing any hacking in upstream code at all.
 ... Needless to say, this is an advanced feature that most developers will never need. But Evennia was always intended to be heavily customizable and having the option is a good thing!

Another feature that will come for 1.0 is a REST-API, added by one of our contributors. This uses Django-REST-Framework and makes it easier for external programs to authenticate and fetch data out of the Evennia database (great both for external apps, websites or custom what-have-you).
At this time you can only fetch database objects via this interface, you cannot perform Command-calls or "play the game" this way (REST is a stateless concept and Evennia Commands tend to retain state).

Many other fixes and contributions

There's a truckload of stuff already available in master branch, but with the latest contributions of bigger code changes, we have started to use the Evennia develop branch again in earnest again. For a summary of the changes so far, check out the Changelog. 

However, unless you want to contribute to Evennia itself (or really, really want to be on the bleeding edge), you are still recommended to use the master branch for now. A lot of work still to do, as said.


Image ©George Hodan, released under CC0 Public Domain

Creating Evscaperoom, part 1

Over the last month (April-May 2019) I have taken part in the Mud Coder's Guild Game Jam "Enter the (Multi-User) Dungeon". This year the theme for the jam was One Room.

The result was Evscaperoom, an text-based multi-player "escape-room" written in Python using the Evennia MU* creation system. You can play it from that link in your browser or MU*-client of choice. If you are so inclined, you can also vote for it here in the jam (well, no more).

This little series of (likely two) dev-blog entries will try to recount the planning and technical aspects of the Evscaperoom. This is also for myself - I'd better write stuff down now while it's still fresh in my mind!

Update: The next part of this blog is here.

Update 2: The Evscaperoom can these days be played by connecting to the Evennia game demo at https://demo.evennia.com.

Inception 

When I first heard about the upcoming game-jam's theme of One Room, an 'escape room' was the first thing that came to mind, not the least because I just recently got to solve my my own first real-world escape-room as a gift on my birthday. 

If you are not familiar with escape-rooms, the premise is simple - you are locked into a room and have to figure out a way to get out of it by solving practical puzzles and finding hidden clues in the room. 

While you could create such a thing in your own bedroom (and there are also some one-use board game variants), most escape-rooms are managed by companies selling this as an experience for small groups. You usually have one hour to escape and if you get stuck you can press a button (or similar) to get a hint.

I thought making a computer escape-room. Not only can you do things in the computer that you cannot do in the real world, restricting the game to a single room limits so that it's conceivable to actually finish the damned thing in a month. 

A concern I had was that everyone else in the jam surely must have went for the same obvious idea. In the end that was not an issue at all though.


Basic premises
 
I was pretty confident that I would technically be able to create the game in time (not only is Python and Evennia perfect for this kind of fast experimentation and prototyping, I know the engine very well). But that's not enough; I had to first decide on how the thing should actually play. Here are the questions I had to consider:

Room State 

 An escape room can be seen as going through multiple states as puzzles are solved. For example, you may open a cabinet and that may open up new puzzles to solve. This is fine in a single-player game, but how to handle it in a multi-player environment?

My first thought was that each object may have multiple states and that players could co-exist in the same room, seeing different states at the same time. I really started planning for this. It would certainly be possible to implement.

But in the end I considered how a real-world escape-room works - people in the same room solves it together. For there to be any meaning with multi-player, they must share the room state.

So what I went with was a solution where players can create their own room or join an existing one. Each such room is generated on the fly (and filled with objects etc) and will change as players solve it. Once complete and/or everyone leaves, the room is deleted along with all objects in it. Clean and tidy.

So how to describe these states? I pictured that these would be described as normal Python modules with a start- and end function that initialized each state and cleaned it up when a new state was started. In the beginning I pictured these states as being pretty small (like one state to change one thing in the room). In the end though, the entire Evscaperoom fits in 12 state modules. I'll describe them in more detail in the second part of this post. 

Accessibility and "pixel-hunting" in text

When I first started writing descriptions I didn't always note which objects where interactive. It's a very simple and tempting puzzle to add - mention an object as part of a larger description and let the player figure out that it's something they can interact with. This practice is sort-of equivalent to pixel-hunting in graphical games - sweeping with the mouse across the screen until you find that little spot on the screen that you can do something with.

Problem is, pixel-hunting's not really fun. You easily get stuck and when you eventually find out what was blocking you, you don't really feel clever but only frustrated. So I decided that I should clearly mark every object that people could interact with and focus puzzles on better things.


In fact, in the end I made it an option:

As part of this I had to remind myself never to use colors only when marking important information: Visually impaired people with screen readers will simply miss that. Not to mention that some just disable colors in their clients.

So while I personally think option 2 above is the most visually pleasing, Evscaperoom defaults to the third option. It should should start everyone off on equal footing. Evennia has a screen-reader mode out of the box, but I moved it into the menu here for easy access.

Inventory and collaboration

In a puzzle-game, you often find objects and combine them with other things. Again, this is simple to do in a single-player game: Players just pick things up and use them later.

But in a multi-player game this offers a huge risk: players that pick up something important and then log off. The remaining players in that room would then be stuck in an unsolvable room - and it would be very hard for them to know this.

In principle you could try to 'clean' player inventories when they leave, but not only does it add complexity, there is another issue with players picking things up: It means that the person first to find/pick up the item is the only one that can use it and look at it. Others won't have access until the first player gives it up. Trusting that to anonymous players online is not a good idea.

So in the end I arrived at the following conclusions:

• As soon as an item/resource is discovered, everyone in the room must be able to access it immediately.
• There can be no inventory. Nothing can ever be picked up and tied to a specific player.
• As soon as a discovery is made, this must be echoed to the entire room (it must not be up to the finder to announce what they found to everyone else).  

As a side-effect of this I also set a limit to the kind of puzzles I would allow:

• No puzzles must require more than one player to solve. While one could indeed create some very cool puzzles where people collaborate, it's simply not feasible to do so with random strangers on the internet. At any moment the other guy may log off and leave you stuck. And that's if you even find someone logged in at the same time in the first place! The room should always be possible to solve solo, from beginning to end.

Focusing on objects

So without inventory system, how do you interact with objects? A trademark of any puzzle is using one object with another and also to explore things closer to find clues. I turned to graphical adventure games for inspiration:

Secret of Monkey Island ©1990 LucasArts. Image from old-games.com

A common way to operate on an object in traditional adventure games is to hover the mouse over it and then select the action you want to apply to it. In later (3D) games you might even zoom in of the object and rotate it around with your mouse to see if there are some clues to be had.

While Evennia and modern UI clients may allow you to use the mouse to select objects, I wanted this to work the traditional MUD-way, by inserting commands. So I decided that you as a player would be in one of two states:

• The 'normal' state: When you use look you see the room description.
• The 'focused' state: You focus on a specific object with the examine <target> command (aliases are ex or just e). Now object-specific actions become available to you. Use examine again to "un-focus". 

In the example above, the fireplace points out other objects you could also focus on, whereas the last parenthesis includes one or more "actions" that you can perform on the fireplace only when you have it focused. 

This ends up pretty different from most traditional MUD-style inputs. When I first released this to the public, I found people logged off after their first examine. It turned out that they couldn't figure out how to leave the focus mode. So they just assumed the thing was buggy and quit instead. Of course it's mentioned if you care to write help, but this is clearly one step too many for such an important UI concept. 

So I ended up adding the header above that always reminds you. And since then I've not seen any confusion over how the focus mode works.

For making it easy to focus on things, I also decided that each room would only ever have one object named a particular thing. So there is for example only one single object in the game named "key" that you can focus on. 

Communication

I wanted players to co-exist in the same room so that they could collaborate on solving it. This meant communication must be possible. I pictured people would want to point things out and talk to each other.

In my first round of revisions I had a truckload of individual emotes; you could

      point at target

 for example. In the end I just limited it to  

     say/shout/whisper <message>

and 

     emote <whatever>

And seeing what people actually use, this is more than enough (say alone is probably 99% of what people need, really). I had a notion that the shout/whisper could be used in a puzzle later but in the end I decided that communication commands should be strictly between players and not have anything to do with the puzzles.

I removed all other interaction: There is no fighting and without an inventory or requirement to collaborate on puzzles, there is no need for other interactions than to communicate.

First version you didn't even see what the others did, but eventually I added so that you at least saw what other players were focusing on at the moment (and of course if some major thing was solved/found).

In the end I don't even list characters as objects in the room (you have to use the who command to see who's in there with you).

The main help command output.

Story

It's very common for this type of game to have a dangerous or scary theme. Things like "get out before the bomb explodes", "save the space ship before the engines overheat", "flee the axe murderer before he comes back" etc). I'm no stranger to dark themes, but for this I wanted something friendlier and brighter, maybe with a some dark undercurrents here and there.

My Jester character is someone I've not only depicted in art, but she's also an old RP character and literary protagonist of mine. Who else would find it funny to lock someone into a room only to provide crazy puzzles and hints for them to get out again? So my flimsy 'premise' was this: 

The village Jester wants to win the pie eating contest. You are one of her most dangerous opponents. She tricked you to her cabin and now you are locked in! If you don't get out in time, she'll get to eat all those pies on her own and surely win!

That's it - this became the premise from which the entire game flowed. I quickly decided that it to be a very "small-scale" story: no life-or-death situation, no saving of the world. The drama takes place in a small village with an "adversary" that doesn't really want to hurt you, but only to eat more pies than you.

From this, the way to offer hints came naturally - just eat a slice of "hintberry pie" the jester made (she even encourage you to eat it). It gives you a hint but is also very filling. So if you eat too much, how will you beat her in the contest later, even if you do get out?

To further the rustic and friendly tone I made sure the story took place on a warm summer day. Many descriptions describe sunshine, chirping birds and the smell of pie. I aimed at letting the text point out quirky and slightly comedic tone of the puzzles the Jester left behind. The player also sometimes gets teased by the game when doing things that does not make sense.

I won't go into the story further here - it's best if you experience it yourself. Let's just say that the village has some old secrets. And and the Jester has her own ways of doing things and of telling a story. The game has multiple endings and so far people have drawn very different conclusions in the end.

Scoring

Most often in escape rooms, final score is determined by the time and the number of hints used. I do keep the latter - for every pie you eat, you get a penalty on your final score.

As for time - this background story would fit very well with a time limit (get out in X time, after which the pie-eating contest will start!). But from experience with other online text-based games I decided against this. Not only should a player be able to take a break, they may also want to wait for a friend to leave and come back etc. 

But more importantly, I want players to explore and read all my carefully crafted descriptions! So I'd much rather prefer they take their time and reward them for being thorough. 

So in the end I give specific scores for actions throughout the game instead. Most points are for doing things that drive the story forward, such as using something or solving a puzzle. But a significant portion of the score comes from turning every stone and trying everything out. The nice side-effect of this is that even if you know exactly how to solve everything and rush through the game you will still not end up with a perfect score. 

The final score, adjusted by hints is then used to determine if you make it in time to the contest and how you fare. This means that if you explore carefully you have a "buffer" of points so eating a few pies may still land you a good result in the end.
 

First sketch

I really entered the game 'building' aspect with no real notion of how the Jester's cabin should look nor which puzzles should be in it. I tried to write things down beforehand but it didn't really work for me. 

So in the end I decided "let's just put a lot of interesting stuff in the room and then I'll figure out how they interact with each other". I'm sure this is different from game-maker to game-maker. But for me, this process worked perfectly. 

My first, very rough, sketch of the Jester's cabin

The above, first sketch ended up being what I used, although many of the objects mentioned never ended up in the final game and some things switched places. I did some other sketches too, but they'd be spoilers so I won't show them here ...


The actual game logic

The Evscaperoom principles outlined above deviate quite a bit from the traditional MU* style of game play. 

While Evennia provides everything for database management, in-game objects, commands, networking and other resources, the specifics of your game is something you need to make yourself - and you have the full power of Python to do it!

So for the first three days of the jam I used Evennia to build the custom game logic needed to provide the evscaperoom style of game play. I also made the tools I needed to quickly create the game content (which then took me the rest of the jam to make). 

In part 2 of this blog post I will cover the technical details of the Evscaperoom I built. I'll also go through some issues I ran into and conclusions I drew. I'll link to that from here when it's available!

Continue to part 2.

Steaming on, eating jam

Image credit: The Smithsonian

In the last few months, development of the upcoming Evennia 0.9 has been steaming on. Evennia is, as you may know, a Python library for creating text-based multiplayer games (MUDs, MUSH etc).
But it's not all backend work! There is also some sweet game-jamming going on, I get to that at the end. 

Evennia progress towards Python3 

The regular Evennia develop branch is now running completely in Python 3. Since we are using some new features of this Python release, we will be aiming for Python 3.7 as a minimum version once Evennia 0.9 goes stable. We will also use Django 2.1 and likely Twisted 19 - so we'll be pretty much up-to-date on all our main dependencies.

Now, while the release of Evennia 0.9 is still some time away (there are a bunch of regular bug fixes and minor features that I want to get in there too (see the progress here on the github 0.9 project page), it's worth to consider how much work it'll be for you to migrate and if you should wait or jump in right now.

If you are new, I still recommend you use regular master branch Evennia (using Python 2.7). This is for which all wiki articles and documentation online is currently written after all. Once we move to python3, you'll need to convert your code ... but syntactically the two are really not that different and conversion should not be much of an issue.

Not only are there automatic converters for most stuff, you should only need to do one pass to make sure things work and then you'll be done. This article is pretty old but it serves well to identify the main differences. Later Py3 versions just adds new stuff which you would just not have had access to in Python2.7. Once 0.9 is released, we'll also make guides for how you go about converting existing code (apart from the wealth of info on this topic online).
 
That said, if you are feeling more adventurous, or really want to use Python3 right away, many of the Evennia developer regulars have been running and testing develop branch for months now. It's overall been a pretty painless transition - as said, py3 is not that different from py2.

However, develop branch has other features beyond the py3 jump. And those are not yet documented in the main docs. So you'll have to contend with that (but asking in chat/forum works of course). However while it works fine for development already, as a matter of principle I do not recommend ever using Evennia's develop branch for a production game - it can change quickly and may occationally be broken. You have been warned! 

Game Jam

We are now a little more than a week into the Mud Coders Guild's second yearly Game Jam. This year's theme is "One Room".

I really hope some more Evennia devs jump on this one because Evennia is perfect for this kind of experimental games. This is because Evennia is not imposing a game style on you - while there are default commands you are free to replace or customize the commands, objects and every aspect of your game to be as specific as you want to your game.

For example, I have a small Game Jam contribution in the works, where I very quickly reworked the default Evennia setup to pretty much make it into a different genre of game.

Usually the systems I make for Evennia are generic and intended for any game-type. By contrast, making somehing highly niched is super-fast to do: Building a whole new framework for game mechanisms along with build helpers for me to quickly make content took no more than three days.

There will no doubt be some iteration, but I hope to spend the rest of the jam time on content and gameplay. I have some RL things happening in the coming weeks (including work on Evennia proper) but if I can get the time to tie my jam entry together, I'll likely make one or two blog posts about how it was developed and my reasons for making the choices i did. Most likely the code will appear as an Evennia contribution in case people want to do something similar for their own projects.

So, busy days.

Evennia in Hacktoberfest 2017

Evennia, the Python MUD/MUSH/MU* creation library participates in the Hacktoberfest 2017 (sign up on that page)! Hacktoberfest is open for all open-source projects like ours. After registering, if you make at least four Pull Requests to a public repo on Github during October (need not just be to Evennia), you win a limited-edition T-shirt!

The help Evennia out and get your T-Shirt, look at our Issue Tracker. I have marked some issues with "Hacktoberfest" but you could take on any issue you want. Take a look in particular at the Unit test issue if you are looking to get into contributing on a smaller scale while helping us tremendously.

If you have any questions on contributing (or it's your first time making a Pull Request), don't be shy to drop into #evennia on irc.freenode.net or ask in our forum/mailing list. Have fun!

The luxury of a creative community

For this blog post I want to focus on the series of very nice pull requests coming in from a growing cadre of contributors over the last few months.

Contributed goodness

People have put in a lot of good work to boost Evennia, both by improving existing things and by adding new features. Thanks a lot everyone (below is just a small selection)!

•  Contrib: Turn-based combat system - this is a full, if intentionally bare-bones implementation of a combat system, meant as a template to put in your particular game system into.
• Contrib: Clothing sytem - a roleplaying mechanic where a character can 'wear' items and have this show in their descriptions. Worn items can also be layered to hide that underneath. Had plenty of opportunities for extensions to a given game.
• Contrib: An 'event' system is in the works, for allowing privileged builders to add dynamic code to objects that fires when particular events happen. The PR is not yet merged but promises the oft pondered feature of in-game coding without using softcode (and notably also without the security of softcode!). 

• A lot of PRs, especially from one user, dealt with cleanup and adherence to PEP8 as well as fixing the 'alerts' given by LGTM on our code (LGTM is by the way a pretty nifty service, they parse the code from the github repo without actually running it and try to find problems. Abiding by their advice results is cleaner code and it also found some actual edge-case bugs here and there not covered by unit tests. The joint effort has brought us down from some 600+ alerts to somewhere around 90 - the remaining ones are alerts which I don't agree with or which are not important enough to spend effort on). 
• The help mechanics of Evennia were improved by splitting up the default help command into smaller parts, making it easier to inject some changes to your help system without completely replacing the default one. 
• Evennia's Xterm256 implementation was not correctly including the additional greyscale colors, those were added with new tags |=a ... |=z.
• Evennia has the ability to relay data to external services through 'bots'. An example of this is the IRC bot, which is a sort of 'player' that sits in an in-game channel and connects that to a counterpart-bot sitting in a remote IRC channel. It allows for direct game-IRC communication, something enjoyed by people in the Evennia demo for many years now. The way the bot was defined used to be pretty hard-coded though. A crafty contributor changed that though, but incorporating the bot mechanism into Evennia's normal message flow. This allows for adding new types of bots or extending existing ones without having to modify Evennia's core. There is already an alternative IRC bot out there that represents everyone in the IRC room as a room full of people in the MUD. 
• Evennia's Attributes is a database table connected to other objects via a ForeignKey relation. This relation is cached on the object. A user however found that for certain implementations, such as using Attributes for large coordinate systems, non-matches (that is failed Attribute lookups on the object) can also be cached and leads to dramatic speed increases for those particular use cases. A PR followed. You live and learn.
• Another contributor helped improve the EvEditor (Evennia's VIM-like in-game text editor) by giving it a code-mode for editing Python code in-game with auto-indents and code execution. Jump into the code mode with the command @py/edit.
• Time scheduling is another feature that has been discussed now and then and has now been added through a PR. This means that rather than specifying 'Do this in 400 seconds' you can say 'do this at 12AM, in-game time'. The core system works with the real-world time units. If you want 10 hours to a day or two weeks to a month the same contributor also made an optional calendar contrib for that!
• A new 'whisper' command was added to the Default cmdset. It's an in-game command for whispering to someone in the same room without other people hearing it. This is a nice thing to have considering Evennia is out-of-the-box pretty much offering the features of a 'talker' type of game.
• Lots of bug fixes big and small!
• Some at_* hooks were added, such as at_give(giver, getter). This allows for finer control of the give process without handling all the logics at the command level. There are others hooks in the works but those will not be added until in Evennia 0.7. 

About that Evennia 0.7 ...

So while PRs are popping up left and right in master I've been working in the devel branch towards what will be the Evennia 0.7 release. The branch is not ready for public consumption and testing yet But tentatively it's about halfway there as I am slowly progressing through the tickets. Most of the upcoming features were covered in the previous blog post so I'll leave it at that.

I just want to end by saying that it's a very luxurious (and awesome) feeling for me to see master-branch Evennia expand with lots of new stuff "without me" so to speak. The power of Open Source indeed!
  

Image from http://maxpixel.freegreatpicture.com, released as public domain.

Emoting system, or how to chat up a girl

A few days ago I pushed an emoting contribution to Evennia. A "contrib" is an optional plugin system that is not part of core Evennia but is meant to be easily picked up and used in people's own designs.

If you are not familiar with what an emoting system does, it is a way to decribe the actions of a character in the game. The simplest form of emote is a single command (like the command dance leading to some canned response, or in the case of a graphical game, a dance animation). This contribution offers a more sophisticated system though, allowing input like the following:

emote /me smiles at /cheerful as he sits at her table. "Hello!" he says.

Now, this includes /keywords that relate to the objects in the room. So assuming there is a very cheerful girl in the room, this string will come out as 

Griatch smiles at a very cheerful girl as he sits at her table. "Hello!" he says. 

But she will actually see only my outward appearance (the short description) since she doesn't know me. So the cheerful girl (let's say her name is Sandra) would for example see

A man in flowing robes smiles at Sandra as he sits at her table. "Hello!" he says.

The emoting system has the following features: 

• Short description replacement in emotes and in searches, as seen above. This means that you can do look cute and the system will know what you want to look at (in vanilla Evennia you'd need to use look Sandra).
• Multi-word searching and disambiguation. If there is a cute girl and a cute puppy both in the same room, your referencing of /cute will  give an error listing the alternatives. You can then either include more words to make your reference unique or use an index (1-cute, 2-cute) to make it clear who you mean. This mimics normal object-key disambiguation in Evennia.
• Recognition. You can assign your own aliases to people. If Sandra introduces herself you could assign her the name Sandra and henceforth be able to reference her as such and see that name appear. But you could also name her The girl calling herself Sandra if you didn't believe that's her actual name.
• Languages. Everything within double-quotes is parsed as spoken language (like the Hello! above). By using writing this as (elvish)"Hello!", this could be spoken in another language and those who don't speak elvish would receive an obfuscated string.
• Masking. A person wearing a mask can force people's recognition replacement to deactivate so that they are not recognized anymore.

The emoting contrib comes as two files in evennia/contrib/: rpsystem.py and rplanguage.py. To use them fully, make your Characters and Rooms inherit from the supplied classes and/or add the new commands to the Character command set. Enjoy!

image ©Griatch, from griatch-art.deviantart.com

Slowly moving through town

After getting questions about it I recently added the Slow Exit contribution to the main repository as an example. 

Delayed movement is something often seen in various text games, it simply means that the time to move from room to room is artificially extended.

Evennia's default model uses traditional MU* rooms. These are simple nodes with exits linking them together. Such Rooms have no internal size and no inherent spatial relationship to each other. Moving from any Room to any other is happening as fast as the system can process the movement.

Introducing a delay on exit traversal can have a surprisingly big effect on a game:

• It dramatically changes the "feel" of the game. It often makes the game feel less "twitch" and slows things down in a very real way. It lets Players consider movement as a "cost".
• It simulates movement speed. A "quick" (or maybe well-rested) character might perceive an actual difference in traversal. The traversal speed can vary depending on if the Character is "running" or "walking".
• It can emulate travel distance. An Exit leading to "the top of the mountain" may take longer to traverse than going "inside the tent".
• It makes movement a "cost" to take into consideration in the game. Moving back and forth over and over across a distance of multiple rooms becomes a much more daunting prospect with a time delay than if you could just zip along as quickly as you could press the button. This also has effects on map and quest design.

Introducing delayed movement in Evennia is simple. But to explain the idea, let's first briefly explain how Evennia implements Exits.

A brief sideline: About Exits

An Exit in Evennia is a persistent Object sitting in a room. The Exit class is just like any Object except for two things - it stores a "destination" property and it houses a CommandSet on itself. This particular CommandSet holds a single command with the same name as the Exit object.

Commands and CommandSets are things I've covered in earlier blog posts. Suffice to say is that any number of command sets can be merged together dynamically to at any moment represent the commands available to the Character at any given time or situation.

What happens when an Exit bject is in the same room as a Character is that the Exit's command set is dynamically merged with that of the Character. This means a new command - which always has the same name as the Exit - becomes available. The result is that if the Exit object is called "south", the Character can use the command "south". By default all the command does is to call a hook method on the Exit object. This hook hooks simply moves the calling Character to the "destination" stored by the Exit. Done!

The nice thing with this is that the whole system is implemented without any special cases or custom hard-wired code. It also means that the entire Exit system can be changed and modified without ever touching Evennia's core.
 

Delaying Exits

To delay the traversal, the principle is simple - after the Exit command has triggered, wait for a little while before continuing.

Technically we define a new class of Exit, let's call it SlowExit, inheriting from the default Exit. We locate the spot where the Exit normally sends traversing objects on their way (this is a method called move_to()).

Since Evennia is based on Twisted, we use Twisted's intrinsic CallLater() function to delay the move for as many seconds we desire (in the contrib I use a thin wrapper around CallLater called delay()). The result is that the command is called, you get a little text saying that you have started moving ... and a few seconds later you actually move.

Once one understands how Exits work it's really quite straight forward - see the code on github for more details (it's got plenty of comments).

In the contrib are also some example utility commands for setting one's movement speed and to abort movement if you change your mind before the timeout has passed.

This simple start can easily be expanded as befits each individual game. One can imagine introducing anything from stamina costs to make travel time be dynamically calculated based on terrain or other factors.

Extending time and details

For the fun of it I added an "Extended Room" contrib to Evennia the other night.

("Contribs" are optional code snippets and systems that are not part of the actual codebase. They are intended for you to use or dissect as you like in your game development efforts).

The ExtendedRoom is a room typeclass meant to showcase some more advanced features than the default one. Its functionality is by all means nothing revolutionary in MUD-world, but it was fun and very simple to do using only Evennia's basic building blocks - the whole thing took me some two hours to code, document and clean up for a contrib push. The "ExtendedRoom" contribution has the following features:

• Season-based descriptions. The new Room typeclass will change its overall description based on the time of year (the contrib supports the four seasons, you can hack this as you please). It's interesting from an implementation point of view since it doesn't require any Script or ticker at all - it just checks on-demand, whenever it is being looked at, only updating if the season has actually changed. There is also a general description used as a fallback in case of a missing seasonal one.
• Time-of-day-based descriptions. Within each Season-based description you can embed time-of-day based ones with special tags. The contrib supports four time slots out of the box (morning, afternoon, evening, night). In the description, you just embed time-dependent text within tags, like <morning>Morning sunlight is shining through the windows</morning>. Only time-relevant tags will be shown. This is a simple regular expression substitution, should be easy to expand on if one wants more fine-grained time slots.
• Details. I took the inspiration of these from a MOO tutorial I read a long time ago. "Details" are "virtual" look-targets in the room. It allows you to add visual interest without having to add a bunch of actual objects for that purpose. Details are simply stored in a dictionary on the room. Details don't change with Season in this implementation, but they are parsed for time-of-day based tags!
• Custom commands. The room is supported by extending two of the custom commands. The Details require a slightly modified version of the look command. There is also a new @desc for setting/listing details and seasonal descriptions. The new time command, finally, simply shows the current game time and season in the room.

Installing and testing the snippet is simple - just add the new commands to the default cmdset (they will dynamically replace the same-named default ones), dig a few rooms of the new typeclass and play around! Especially the details do make building interesting rooms a lot more fun (I got hung up playing with them way too long last night).