Danny: 00:00 Welcome rats, deadbeats one and all to the Titans of Text podcast. We are your hosts Danny "Austerity" Nissenfeld Eric: 00:20 and Eric Ostrich Danny: 00:22 and we have with us today Jane of Stillborn, the veritable Nyarlathotep of the mudding world. Jane is the owner, coder, and creative force behind the upcoming Moo Stillborn. We're going to take a trip into the world of stillborn, what led to its creation, the world lore of its various scenarios, the intricacies of running a round based MUD and the depth of experience to be had there. Welcome to you Jane. Eric: 00:49 All right. So I guess we'll start with what brought you to the decision to start stillborn. Jane: 00:54 For 10 years I've been making stuff on Garry's mod. I'd explain what that is, but I think a good amount of people are already familiar for those who aren't It's a halflife two mod and you can make basically anything you want if you know how to code in Lua. So back when I didn't know anything about programming I made this thing. It was named after a map that I really liked. And the idea was that there'd be very little lore and be extremely ambiguous, but it would like be a session thing. Like the same thing wouldn't happen every time. What would happen kind of depended on what the players did and that was like 10 years ago, so multiple years after that I did it again. There's one dude and there were a lot of internet tough guys in that era. So one guy was, it was called rebirth, the thing I was doing and he was insistent on attacking everything that had my name on it. Jane: 01:45 So he said, "You midaswell call it Stillborn when I'm done owning it." And when I remembered that I thought that's going to be a great backhanded middle finger if anyone ever notices. I think it's the name itself is a pretty fitting warning for what the game might have in it. You know, in case anyone thinks it might be family friendly. But the main thing was that the restrictions of graphical games, this is much like how slaves of Armok became Dwarf Fortress. You can't hit the maximum depth possible outside of the tech space medium. And I played a lot of HellMOO and I thought, holy Shit, what can I do? And um, things just kind of went from there. I remember the first thing I made was the ability to stuff a body into a grinder and you could like turn a crank to get meat juice. Jane: 02:32 I needed to, I knew I could put that back in at some point. Danny: 02:35 There was something like that in the first stillborn test. You were, you were extracting blood... Jane: 02:39 the meat press, but you would have to, um, you'd have to put the meat in there like after you dissected it. What I'm talking about it was like a full body thing. And I think what it was supposed to be was that the place that it was in was producing soylent a lot like hellmoo but with more weight to it rather than it being a pop culture reference. Not that that doesn't have its place in hellmoo. Danny: 03:02 So you're playing hellmoo, you were making your own stuff in, in some other areas. Um, how do you choose which, which core to start with for stillborn. Jane: 03:12 At first it was RPG core. At the time I really didn't know what I was doing. I did that and proceeded to be unable to navigate any of it, modify; I did add colors to the stat screen, but that was about it. And even then I didn't do so in the way that I consider more proper now. Then for three years we used hellcore and this is before it was round based. It was a persistent MMO, like questing and such. And I was never happy with this because it made adding the complexity to the game much harder than I wanted it to be because it was persistent. It didn't reset. So if you added a lot of features to make players suffer, die, you know, stuff like that, it would kind of suck because if you made those have lasting consequences, those could potentially last forever or be extremely annoying to get rid of because otherwise they don't mean anything. Jane: 04:03 The same concept applies permadeath and um, what we use anonymous objects for in stillborn now we can only use with something called wifes back then. A lot of other move programmers for some reason where they like these things. What I know is that they managed to screw up stillborn so bad that all the characters belonging to one player in particular. This was really strange because there was no actual connection between these characters other than their email address. If you as much as looked at them, the MOO would crash. Then we uh, then we switch to ghost core because I thought a lot of our restrictions is trying to work around the hellcore base because again, that's what we were using and I imagined if we code a lot of our own core we'll have a lot fewer problems and that did turn out to be the case. Jane: 04:50 So now we use on, it started with ghostcore but we've practically removed everything in it that we weren't going to use and replaced everything that we were with their own systems. Some have had a skills work that was taken from hellmoo as well as the action key system. I cannot fathom living without it, but those are in base hellcore and even if they aren't, I'm an admin on hellmoo and Gilmore didn't care before he quit if I took anything. As far as the binary now it uses toaststunt, which I heavily recommend to any moo programmer out there because you can compile it in 64 bit. You're going to have numbers way bigger than 2.14 billion and you know, faster computing in general. Eric: 05:27 Yeah, I think I've seen a bit of um, distantorigin and what lisdude talk about toaststunt a bit and it sounds like there they're doing some cool stuff for the new base. Uh, what about the lore of stillborn? Like what are your largest sources of inspiration for that? Jane: 05:44 Well, a large part of that comes from stitching together all the stuff i did. That caldern thing I was talking about that served as the foundation for one of the most important factions in the game, which is how earthly people are on Genova in the first place. The story isn't all about them. A lot of the planning game modes take place before their time. Jane: 06:06 Dreams have a lot to do with the process also. I'll just see some weird shit and I'll think about it for maybe 30 minutes and I'll get a neat idea. I do wish I had more details on this process but I really don't. But something very important is that it begins with the assumption that the Lovecraftian/Cthulu mythos is true. That's, that's a baseline thing. Some bits of what August Derleth added to the meet those after Lovecraft's death sometimes Iare added, sometimes aren't, I don't like what he did with the whole, the entire point of Lovecraft work other than being racist, let's forget that for a second, was that there was no such thing as an ultimate good or evil and that's an important thing in stillborn too. Danny: 06:51 Stillborn is a round based system, which is uh, probably not just uncommon among muds but almost unheard of, uh, outside of a very few. How does the round based system work with stillborn? Jane: 07:05 Is it okay if I start with, so like I mentioned, I was having a lot of trouble working with the hellcore questing and hoarding items and all that stuff because if people can horde, you know and grind overnight for hours to get the highest numbers possible, they're going to do it and they're going to break the game and then that's going to make player versus player interactions very, very unbalanced. Jane: 07:29 One of the things I hated most was that say you got a cro bar and a baseball bat, right, and if hit someone in the knee with it in real life it would hurt. You'd probably get a felony assault charge, stuff like that. But because of the nature of the persistent roleplaying game, one had to be stronger than the other for game balance purposes so he could feel like you were upgrading and so he could justify the price of one over the other and it's not that you can make crowbars able to pry open people's apartment doors anyway because that would be unbalanced. If anyone could do that for just 30 ingame dollars, then I played enough space station 13 where I got the round idea from to find out why they didn't have these problems. And it was because it reset occasionally. People weren't worried about progressing their slow as molasses months long plots or finally ticking upward of a billion ingame dollars, stuff like that because everything ends after long enough amount of time. And I know a lot of people who like progress, it's the round system is not for everyone, but I'm more interested in seeing the volatile interactions between game systems and players that want to do stupid things or smart things that get people they don't want to live killed. And I want it to replicate that in a mud because I saw no one else was doing it. This is going to be unique and it will finally let me make the game that I want to make, which would be as close to a roguelike experience while remaining multiplayer as possible like some kind of fucked up version of dwarf fortress. Jane: 09:00 As far as how that works, uh, where players end up their account objects, for lack of a better word they're in the snuff theater, which is our fancy name for the lobby. There's a whole lore piece with that all the uh, info screens in this area at the bottom that says Sabbath Theater property, steal and die. Uh, that was someone else's idea. I liked it a lot, but everyone's in this lobby and by default there's no round running. So people can type in worlds to see the available game modes, you know, the maps that defines the setting, technological progression, classes available and stuff like that. So without one, people are prompted to vote for one now until the game is fully, fully ready, they're probably won't be multiple at a time because we're testing specific features and specific maps. But the point is they vote for one. The one that wins gets loaded as characters are made, they're made for each game mode and specific. You know, you can make one for industrial nightmare, make one for eclipse, make one for Sepsis, et cetera. Jane: 10:02 So after one's loaded, you can load a character that belongs to that gamemode and there are different roles that one can select based on whether the round is already running or not. For example, ones that you can pick before the rounds start concern the people that already live within the circumstances defined in the game mode. Say it's a some small village, right? So before the round starts you'd be able to pick say mayor or peasant or something like that. And when the round starts you would spawn in the village. After that you would have something more along the lines of caravans. People that don't already live there but have the opportunity to travel there if they like, whether for migration purposes or just to ruin everything. In the case of eclipse it would be ruining everything cause you get to play as a bloodthirsty deadbeat Jane: 10:51 After long enough, some maps have in conditions, some of them don't. For the ones where player construction and longevity is actually the purpose, like a constructing a village, you know, Minecraft type shit. And, uh, in those cases, players are after long enough able to vote to end the game. Once the round ends for any reason, everyone's kicked back to the lobby. People are then allowed to discuss the events of that round because if you do that while the rounds is running, that's metagaming and that can spoil plots. And then the next one load cycle repeats. Eric: 11:29 So how do you balance, I know stillborn kind of tries to go as as far into realism as possible, but how do you balance realism versus gameplay and like make sure it's still fun? Jane: 11:41 Okay. So for instance, the art of farming, I might, I might offend a farmer by saying this, but based on my knowledge, the art of farming is not too terribly complicated. Yesterday we had the dilemma of figuring out how the plants planted by some of the higher farming skill could differentiate from someone who's never held a seed in their life. As a pure gameplay abstraction a skill check that runs on the farming skill would add a quality to the plant. Once it grew. And this would both double as its health. It would train if it, if it dehydrated than if it was zero or it hits zero, then it dies. But it also changes the output of that plant. So someone who really knows how to work, uh, you know, a garden hoe or something, will be able to grow the best weed you've ever seen in your life, just for pure gameplay purposes so that they would favor someone that knows what they're doing rather than Joe dumb ass who just showed up and he stole a bunch of jelly beans out of someone's pocket and he thinks they're going to grow into lots of food. And absolutely none of that system to my awareness is realistic or how botany works, but for gameplay purposes and to create that skill gap. Jane: 13:01 Why not? No one's going to complain unless that, unless they want farming to be boring. It's just that I don't. Danny: 13:08 Yeah, I don't know that anyone, anyone wants any game polices. Somebody boring by design necessarily. Jane: 13:14 It's a, it was a joke. Some people or some people sacrifice fun for realism far too much and that's definitely not what stillborn is about. Some people would imagine that in some areas such as the health simulation, but the entire idea is just to add more depth to everything. Depth is more preferred than than realism. But often those two work together. I remember when it was a persistent game we had three rules for making suggestions. There was a rule of cool, the rule of realism and the rule of fun. As long as two of these were satisfied, it's probably okay. Danny: 13:53 Let's, uh, let's talk about the first test of the first stillborn test, uh, was in the industrial nightmare scenario, if I remember correctly, I did play it. How was that received by the community? The stillborn community and, and how well, how well do you feel it went? Jane: 14:11 Depression's a bit for starters. And I thought it didn't go great at first, but it did fulfill the purpose that we set out to do, which was fixing all the baseline bugs, you know, stuck with the health sim, combat, making sure all that worked. Really what that was was just throwing a bunch of rabid rats into a room, seeing what would happen and what we had to fix if something wrong happened. And it actually went so smoothly that one player got the bright idea to start a cult and going around chopping off everyone's dicks. And this was while the game is extremely bare bones, but that was already creating both a compelling story and a sense of fear in anyone that wasn't already involved with what they were doing. And that's what the game's about. Just the improv off the wall, things players can do and it creates something that people are gonna remember for a long time. And none of that was scripted. Danny: 15:12 Uh, I don't, I don't know if I'm gonna if I'm going to regret asking this, was was the person specifically targeting immobile corpses of people or were... Jane: 15:22 They were targeting living connected players before we made it. So you can, if you're not wearing a shoe on a foot, when you step into the room with the glass shard, if you don't already know, the glass shard is there by looking into the room or seeing it. If you manage not to step on it, they would go around to the apartment building. The only one that worked at the time, this is also before we fixed it, so that glass shards through their damage could cut people's feet off. They went around to people's front apartment doors and place down the glass shards, knocked on the door and waited. Usually, this should cut someone's foot off, making them unable to escape. And I thought that was hilarious. Danny: 16:05 All right. Can, I can remember from the limited time I actually was playing SS13, um, that, that, that was definitely something that happened a lot, uh, in especially on the goon servers. Uh, it's this emergent systematic, uh, choices that people would make and the whole game would just become about something like that, uh, at least for that round. Jane: 16:31 Yeah, that's, uh, that inspired me a ton. My main problem with ss13 though is that I don't think on average it takes itself seriously enough. And the servers that do sacrifice gameplay for quote, roleplay unquote, and that offends me very deeply. And by that I mean people, you know, taking forever to write out emotes and I understand that has a place. But what I'm trying to do is make the most impressive mechanical demonstration possible so that you don't need to use emotes or poses to substitute for things that game doesn't have the game should have what you're trying to do and that might interact with some system or object that you didn't know about. It might kill someone, it might amaze you or it might optimize the why you've been doing things. You could learn something, maybe you learned something that no one else knows and you go around telling everyone, in that lies the true magic of the system. Danny: 17:37 What ultimately brought that round to an end? Um, I know I had myself reach to an igmonius end, uh, to a rat which ended my life. Uh, what actually ended that round? Jane: 17:52 I don't remember, but I think it was had something to do with uh, we fixed a part of map generation so I'm going to kill around and load a new one. There weren't really any importance to the endings of the test rounds. I'm sure there will be in future ones that have actual end conditions that wasn't anything special. It might've just been that everyone logged off and I needed to test stuff alone because the way it works is that the way space station 13 worked is that it actually restarts the server. Stillborn doesn't, it stores the zones in one instance and when the round starts it just runs through all the rooms in it, cleans them up, generates, new stuff for the next round. So nothing is ever destroyed or recreated most of the time. And one's with the large worlds and what the rooms are instanced like an ocean we don't really need to store individual objects for every 10 square meters of water, but for streets and such like that, that we needed to stay there and never go away. Those are permanent, but we just regenerate the items when the new round starts. Danny: 19:09 Okay. Oh well we're, we're going to take a brief moment out for a word from one of our many sponsors of the podcasts. Miskatonic University. Are you looking for a place that cares about your education? Come to Miskatonic University and learn science and medicine in an environment unrestricted by the concerns of society. Miskatonic University. We are the light in the darkness. Eric: 19:34 Uh, so as the game brings more people into the community how has that gone? Jane: 19:39 Well currently there's 530 people in the discord and what we do, this is for various reasons. The first reason is because we don't want anyone who would be psychologically harmed by witnessing the contingent things that can happen in stillborn that I don't want to describe in detail until it's more relevant. We don't want to hurt anyone by what we're doing. In fact, quite the opposite. And games that have the things that stillborn have tend to have the less caring approach and I think there needs to be more inhibition there. So really part of that is just making sure anyone that comes in knows what they're getting into, they're cool with it and they wouldn't be bothered by it. The second thing is that we ask everyone where they come from because God forbid the discord invite link ever gets posted on 4chan. Hopefully now that I've said this here, someone won't get that bright idea, but that hasn't happened yet. But I think that would be the worst fear of a growing pain that we currently have. We haven't actually had any yet when I joined hellmoo and I got there because it's stillborn, it impressed Gilmore at the time. They told me the worst mistakes they made was advertising on something awful and 4chan. And I have heeded that advice. Danny: 21:04 Yeah, SA, would basically be the same as 4chan in that. In that case, with the, all the goons showing up. Jane: 21:11 Sabbaths community is, um, for what stillborn is, the community around it is actually a lot more peaceful than I'd hoped for. Not that that's a bad thing. I'm very grateful for it and I really don't want that to change. Danny: 21:26 So, uh, what, uh, what scenario is planned for the next big test? I know you've been posting on the mud, reddit, and on the discord and the guild coders slack, especially that map, ah, which looked pretty, pretty damn cool with that river running through it. Uh, what are the details of the next scenario? Jane: 21:47 Uh, the one in the pictures or the one after that? Danny: 21:50 Oh, whenever one's coming next. I believe the, uh, eclipse is it called for the next one? Jane: 21:56 That's what it's called. Um, that was based on, well, it's not based on, but it's inspired by this, uh, this game that a friend showed me, it's this really obscure Rpg maker thing called classic game. I'm an absolute whore for obscure things, mostly in the RPG maker realm, surreal stuff like off, space funeral. And that's one of them, but it's even more esoteric and I didn't get far into it. So there's much more than what I'm about to describe. But what I saw was snowy island floating around in a void. And somehow I got to thinking, Hey, what if I could somehow tie this to stillborn's God of Fear and Nightmares. Jane: 22:39 So it began with the basic concept of hermits and villages on islands floating through space. That evolved into something along along the lines of it being adjacent to the city in industrial nightmare because that that takes place after as azathoh's awakening. So the empty void after that is kind of just a playground for, you know, the gods to play with. They kinda got their own little pockets they can mess around with. And that's what the area in eclipse is to the god of fear and nightmares. Danny: 23:14 These scenarios are basically zones, uh, persay that you know, the players to make the story essentially. So they're, they're backdrops their settings? Jane: 23:25 Yeah, more or less. At some point though, we do want to add variable events that can happen. This is what space station 13 does with traders, revolutions, the wizard, stuff like that. Eventually we want that kind of thing. But for the most part, it's all about emergence. Eric: 23:43 Do the stillborn staff players, gods in the game? Jane: 23:47 They can, but they generally don't. In fact, much of the staff isn't very active just yet. I'm pretty sure that's because a lot of them aren't familiar with the current code structure. Some of them were making things when it was still hellcore based, but now only the other chief wizard coder is now getting around to programming. I don't know what they're going to do. Some of them have requested that they would be moderators, but a large part of the mission statement is that the game is not swamped by moderators play. Jane: 24:20 I shouldn't have to constantly worry about approval for what they're doing or that they might get smacked for doing something small. But as far as whether they will be able to play gods or not at some point, I do want to make a feature set for them so that they can interact with the world in various ways, including assuming the identity of anything such as the God Fear and Nightmares if they wanted. But I know in one instance what we want to do with the god of, uh, it's either the god of life and death or the god of plants, it definitely has something to do with plants. And the idea was that players would be able to play as the Avatar of this as the antagonist type thing. And the goal would be to just spread growth as much as possible, including reintroducing a living person into the soil to make them into plants. Jane: 25:11 So that's something we want players to be able to do just for the sake of, it'd be fun. You know, people fighting against the God trying to turn them into plants. Danny: 25:21 Would the player have any agency as a plant, would they still be able to, I mean, they wouldn't have eyes necessarily? Jane: 25:28 Uh, we talked about the idea of dead player. Well, at some point we wanted it to be so that players could control things that aren't humans. That's, that's a large part of how the body parts system works. So people will be able to play as animals and such, you know, a dog can't talk unless it's enchanted somehow to be able to do so. But one idea someone suggested was the ability to be reincarnated as a tree. We haven't thought of any agency for a player being a tree but if we were going to make a player have to be a tree for any reason, there would be something to it. Danny: 26:05 I mean, you do have those trees that uh, try to, for lack of a better term, hug people. Jane: 26:11 Um, then they buy you also if you pet your pet, uh, the flowers, they giggle, they spin to do all sorts of stuff. Things like hemp plants don't do anything interesting yet. Flowers are very important to parts of the process, including one school of magic. There are reasons for the more absurd things in stillborn's universe. I know they aren't realistic and I'm not going to try to make any excuses to make it seem like they are. Because like if you try to explain the force in Star Wars, there'd be a lot less star wars fans. Eric: 26:45 Is there any advice you'd give to someone wanting to make their own game? Jane: 26:51 Yeah. Don't, um, someone tries to tell you not to do something. You could probably think about it a lot, but in most cases don't listen because if I had listened to people telling me, you know, dont name it stillborn. Don't do this. Don't do that. Why make it round based ss13 already exists. "No one's ever done that in a mud before". I don't think stillborn would be as unique as it is. There is no reason that any creators should be striving to stick to the status quo. The more unique something is, the better. Eric: 27:25 Yeah. I think we like to call that the why bother brigade? It's out in force everywhere. Jane: 27:31 Yeah fuck them, just tell him to sit and spin, that's my advice. Danny: 27:36 That's, that's good advice to me. So I'd like to, I'd like to thank you for coming out and doing this episode with us, uh, I've enjoyed it. Jane: 27:46 Like I said, I was inspired heavily by hellmoo, roguelikes and such like that. So I'm hoping that in some way I'm doing that for someone that wants to make something maybe a little more socially acceptable, but something else unique for the mud world regardless.