Hungry Hungry Hedgehogs MMORPG: A Glorious Trainwrecks collaborative game-making MUD?

SpindleyQ's picture

I've long been saying that I want an online real-time collaborative game-making tool. The other day, it occurred to me that MUDs exist, and many of them allow regular users to add new rooms and create and script new objects. So I've been looking into setting up LambdaMOO on Glorious Trainwrecks' glorious server. (I would call it "Hungry Hungry Hedgehogs MMORPG", of course.)

Is anyone else interested in this idea? LambdaMOO's scripting language is kind of programmery (as you would expect from a system developed at Xerox PARC with "lambda" in the name), and multiplayer textual game-toy-things are a pretty different animal than Klik & Play monstrosities, but I think it could be pretty interesting nonetheless.

(My research is kind of making me wish someone would write a ZZT MUD with the board editor exposed at all times, though.)

kirkjerk's picture

in theory i adore this

in theory i adore this idea
in practice... i dunno, MUDs never worked for me
(hmm, in 20/20 introspective hindsight, I'm learning that the only thing I really dig in games is socialization, which a MUD has but not nec. more than the IRC channel, and physics-y interactions... which MUDs aren't generally known for.)

SpindleyQ's picture

Well, I'm really not hoping

Well, I'm really not hoping to build a MUD like regular MUDs, where people come to hang out and roleplay or whatever. I guess the best-case scenario in my head is Problem Sleuth, except we all build it together and play it at the same time, somehow.

I dunno, maybe MUDs aren't quite the right thing. They just seem close, you know?

snapman's picture

Make a Whirled community,

Make a Whirled community, maybe?

SpindleyQ's picture

It looks like you make the

It looks like you make the games offline in Flash, which is totally not what I want.

Metaplace is closer, in that you can actually build the game on the web, but I'm not sure if two people can work on it at once? I honestly don't know. I got in the beta the other day, though, and that's kind of what inspired these thoughts. It created a starter world for me with the only thing in it being a sign that said, "SpindleyQ's World". Thus far all of my time on Metaplace has been trying to figure out how to change the text on that sign. I eventually figured out that the text was being drawn on top of a generic sign graphic with a script, and that script was "locked" such that I couldn't edit it or even so much as look at it to see how it worked. Which is pretty friggin' discouraging!

Honestly right now I'm pretty tempted to just say screw it and build a multiplayer ANSI map editor that works over telnet. Which is kind of irrational.

pensive-mosquitoes