Plan for James Dunmow

And so it begins....

Well, really it began about 10 years ago as the pile of illegible scrawlings I call a 'design document' will attest to. Now the challenge is (and always has been) how to actually get the ideal off of the paper and manifest it into something a tad more concrete. Tried this a few times, in a few different mediums - namely in pure text (MUD based) and attempting to mod other titles (like Neverwinter Nights) and failing for all too common reasons - lack of organization, buggyness of code, and/or members of the hobbist team not producing on schedule (or more commonly not at all - then vanishing without word or trace).

So, now I take a crack at it again. What is it, you ask? Well, on the surface anyway it's much like the goals of many others here. An online role-playing game. Not necessarily a MMORPG (the term comes with so much baggage and expectations), since I'd be thrilled with something that runs at around the scale of the MUD I used to help admin - a few hundred people, tops, would be great.

So, where do I start on my quest to build my 'Holy Grail' of online-rpg? This is the first .plan after all. What's the plan? The first and best place to start I figure is breaking stuff. Yup. Breaking everything I can get my hands on. Breaking it, then fixing it to get a good idea of how it all fits together. Not the easiest or most sane way to learn the codebase, but I figure it'll lead me down a few twisty paths and into a few dark corners that I otherwise may not have visited by sticking to the docs and the more commonly trodded places.

So far, what I've decided to throughly break first is the GUI. I could do more fun stuff first, but I figure the GUI and it's associated elements are at the heart of this beast. So, for now my main plan I suppose is to continue breaking it apart and putting it back together in as many different ways as I can possibly imagine.