[MUD-Dev] Graphical Mud-in-a-box musings

[Adam Martin]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Hook" <bwh at wksoftware.com>
To: <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2001 1:18 AM
Subject: [MUD-Dev] Graphical Mud-in-a-box musings

> Okay, I'm still running with this one.

> I can think of three interesting products, each of which may have
> issues.

> 1.  "MyMUD"

> A package of tools, clip art, and scripts that allows anyone to
> create and host a MUD.  A tile editor much like NWN (I think), and
> allows for first or third person rendering.  The package is sold
> effectively as a direct competitor to NWN, without the
> non-commercial use restriction.  If you host an open server, you
> must connect/ping the master server to verify you have a
> legitimate copy (and, of course, this would be hacked out within
> hours, but you gotta try....)  Optional "world packs" are made
> available as a form of secondary income.  No programming APIs are
> provided.  Basically it's a "fill in the blank" style of MUD.

> 2.  "BuildYourMud.lib"

> A package of tools, clip art, and libs that allows a programmer to
> build a server and client fairly trivially.  Significantly lower
> level than "MyMUD" and requires significant development effort to
> build.  Of course, the big plus is that you have a lot of
> flexibility.

[snip]

> I think #1 would be so low volume as to be unviable, and #2 would
> be even worse.

I recently wrote an executive summary on this [1], for a product
placed somewhere between #1 and #2. I found enough data to be
convincing that #2 has huge potential, both in volume and pricing,
so long as you sell to the right market - I looked primarily at
selling to commerical development teams (e.g. "games studios" as
they like to call themselves these days).

C.F. Timothy Dang's remarks, there is also what appears to be a high
volume (from some other tentative enquiries I've made) low pricing
market for #2 in research circles, which includes but is not limited
to academic institutions - i.e. there are commercial entities who do
research too :).

Adam M

[1]

  For clarification, when I say "something between #1 and #2" I
  designed and built a prototype for the exec summary. It was
  (obviously) highly modularised, and intended for people to be
  easily able to overwrite individual modules (which are tiny)
  themselves, but without any artwork at all on the grounds that
  this was one of the two areas where you differentiate your game -
  IMHO the way you play the game is the other, i.e.  the interface +
  the way the game responds to your actions.

  The really difficult bit was studying and deriving paradigms for
  modularising the concepts in known MUDs in such a way that future
  advances/original ideas would not be hindered by the boundaries
  between modules.

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