Getting Textual?

I was brainstorming earlier trying to think of an original idea and I think I have something that is at least interesting. In the spirit of "old school" gaming, I was thinking that it's about time text gaming made a comeback. Some of you may be familiar with MUDs (typically stands for Multi User Dungeon), some may be familiar with single player text adventures, like Zork, but unless you missed the early PC gaming scene entirely, you have probably experienced some form of text game.

A lot of people think that text gaming is dead, and while it is often difficult to convince someone to play a text game for the first time now that graphics are such an important aspect of games, there is a very active text gaming community. People say 2D gaming is dead, but here we are. There will always be interest in all types of gamesnostalgia alone gets countless people to play old video games (though it helps if they're fun!)

If you want to make an online text game, there are many existing code bases that can be built upon, but there are several problems with this. For one, many of the games that build upon an existing game wind up feeling like the exact same thing as the original. Also, MUD servers are typically Linux only. There are, of course, exceptions to this, but the majority of popular code bases to support Windows (or other platforms) only do so through a quick hack to get things "working."

My goal is to create a resource that would allow Torque users to easily create their own textual world. The benefit of using Torque would be having cross-platform support, and also the power of TorqueScript driving the game.

The main features I would like to include for designers would be a graphical mapper, which would allow users to easily implement rooms and entire areas with a few clicks of the mouse, and a linked object manager, which would allow the editing of all types objects, from the player object, to rooms, and even the weapons, armor, and various items that may a part of your story.

As for the coding side, my goal there is to create a very simple framework that will allow a coder to expand upon the base in any way they choose. The idea is not to force a designer into a specific style of game, but to provide the tools necessary to shape their own vision.

This would essentially mean providing the functions that are common in all text games. Printing to the player, printing to all connected users, printing to a specific group of users, action definitions, object scope, input handling ... things of that nature. I feel that taking care of some of the more mundane aspects of coding while still offering the flexibility to do whatever you please is really important.

The server would have to communicate with a telnet client (I know Torque is already capable of doing this, I just don't know what all would need to be modified for what I have in mind) and in addition, would act as a web host, to allow players to view information from the game itself on the game's website.

I am not incredibly experienced with Torque quite yet, so I don't know if there are limitations or difficulties that I am overlooking, but nothing screamed out at me when I started thinking about how to achieve this. I'd be very interested to hear what people think about this, whether it be questions, comments, tips, or anything at all.

I think I may have gone on longer than I anticipated, but I am rather passionate about text games, I suppose. I guess I mostly want to see how people would feel about such a tool, and also anyone can think of any reasons why this wouldn't work (or work well).


For those of you who were not intimidated, thanks for taking the time to read this post,

Derek