Eric:               00:06          Welcome players, coders, builders, wizzes one and all to the Titans of Text podcast. We are your hosts Eric Oestrich.

Danny:              00:17          And Danny "Austerity" Nissenfeld.

Eric:               00:19          And we have with us today Thibaud, the owner and maintainer of Written Realms as well as Addison, one of the participants of the National MUD Building Month. Welcome to you both.

Thibaud:            00:29          Hey guys, thanks for having me on again.

Addison:            00:32          Hey, thanks so much.

Eric:               00:32          All right, so October has ended and with it, NaMuBuMo. So how many entries were submitted in the end?

Thibaud:            00:39          I think we ended up with six. There were three from the written realms and three kind of like game augments where people sort of submitted new zones as part of their game. So yeah, three kind of like telnet classic client and then three from Written Realms.

Danny:              00:54          How did it go overall from a technical perspective as far as written realms goes?

Speaker 3:          01:01          Technically it went pretty well. There were definitely more bugs than I would have liked, but it was also a little bit inevitable because a lot of the worlds that were being built were single player worlds. As you know, the world that we mostly develop as a multiplayer world and we've got two single player worlds that have been around for a little while. There's the introduction which people play when they first click the play button on the front page and then there's the tutorial which goes room by room and teaches some of the concepts with the game. But beyond that we never really had a single player world that was kind of like deep and well developed and all of that. And as it turns out, multiplayer worlds and single player worlds are actually pretty different in terms of what you expect to happen with the data.

New Speaker:        01:45          When you leave essentially and it's a single player world, when you exit the world, you want everything to be exactly how you left it, right? So if you killed a monster, you have a corpse, you exit the world, you reenter the world, you really want that course to still be there. And in a multiplayer world that expectation is not there, right? Corpses decay. Whenever you reboot the world, the data goes back to kind of an initial state. And so there were a lot of things that were a little bit buggy with single player worlds and I got a little bit of a shot to fix some of them before the event started, I'd say probably a couple of weeks before the month people were already starting to kind of check out the world editor and building their own worlds and stuff. But yeah, lots of, lots of bugs. But that being said you know, everything went well for people to build their worlds. So it also could have been a lot worse overall. Very, very pleased with how it went.

Danny:              02:35          So Addison you were a user of written realms before NaMuBuMo started, is that correct?

Addison:            02:42          So I started, I think it was June this year. I kind of was just searching around for text based games as I've kinda been into them a lot lately and I found it and joined the discord and I've pretty much been playing since June.

Danny:              02:56          Was this the first time you had a hand in actually trying to build a one of the worlds?

Addison:            03:01          Yes, it was. Yep.

Danny:              03:03          So is this the first time you've built for any mud or any text based game?

Addison:            03:09          Basically, yes. I've been playing text-based games for like maybe a year or two, but this is definitely the first one where I've actually participated enough to even get to know the people well enough, let alone build an actual world. Yeah.

Danny:              03:25          What was it like, I mean, not like you know, the technical aspects of how the UI goes. I mean, anyone can jump on and give that a go. What was it like for the first time building content like this?

Addison:            03:38          I thought it was like you just said like the UI was, it did help. But lately, a few months ago I changed my major in school to game technology and creating a world out, even like just text-based where it's like not graphic or anything, it's a huge step. Like I thought that it was amazing. I had so many ideas coming to me as every second I wrote. I thought it was amazing.

Eric:               04:02          Did the a month long timeline change how you were thinking about building or anything like that?

Addison:            04:07          At the beginning it was a little easy but as the month progressed it kind of got a little more difficult. I started to crunch a little bit and at the end I had to cut a few things but it kind of changed my perspective in a way. But it was fun.

Danny:              04:23          Teebs, Was there a noticeable increase in traffic during NaMuBuMo?

Thibaud:            04:29          Yeah, for sure. I'd say right before especially cause I think we did some announcement on discord and on the reddit like a few days before and there was definitely a significant uptick of new traffic. And then there was obviously an increase in sustained traffic of returning users who are, you know, builders and other people trying it out. You know, we got three submissions submitted, but there were more than that. People kind of like came in and kick the tires around a little bit, which I think bodes very well for next year. I think there's a lot of, there was a lot more interest than I would have thought that there was. And some of the people just couldn't quite get the world to state that they've wanted. But yeah, there was definitely a good amount of traffic. It was, it was a big boon for us.

Danny:              05:09          And how was how was the discord, the, I know, obviously more people came on, it was do you felt like, like most of the people tried to get to become part of the social community for written realms or was it pretty much just a few people?

Thibaud:            05:23          It definitely got pretty lively, like there's, you know, sometimes before there would be a couple of days that would go by without any banter and there was definitely a lot more people getting to know each other, of course, on top of, you know, asking questions and just like, how does this work and how does that work? And, you know, how can I achieve this? I think one reality of it and that be more this year is that it would have been relatively difficult to build a world without asking me or the people how to do things. There's a couple of how to videos and that sort of started working on a doc site like two days after the contest started. Know, tried to get there, but definitely the world editor, right. And help does a, it's nice to have people around answering questions and kind of walking you through it.

Thibaud:            06:04          And so there was a good amount of just like, Hey, how do I do this? Or here's how you do that as well as a good amount of people brainstorming together and coming up with, with how to do things. This is actually one of the more interesting and rewarding parts of this whole experience for me, when I build worlds, I tend to immediately, as soon as I can't make something work, I try to think, okay, what code is missing there? What feature do we need to build to get there? And I go into this whole process of, okay, what do I need to do for that bridge to be crossable? But a lot of the builders kind of embrace the constraints and a lot of them came up with ways to do things and I didn't even realize and sharing them with each other. And that was a really, really fun, really cool and really rewarding aspect of the, of the event for sure.

Eric:               06:46          So what went well and what went poorly throughout the month? And this is kind of aimed at both. So let's start with Thibaud.

Thibaud:            06:53          Well I think a lot of the things that's sort of that could be seen as having gone poorly ended up going well in the sense that there were a lot of builders who wanted to do things that the platform couldn't quite do. Most of the world editor development so far had been me and Pat sort of run into things that we wanted to do in our worlds. We built the features for them. And in this case, obviously there were lots of people who thought of things that we didn't. And so I had to build a lot of features. I probably ended up building something like a couple dozen features over the month, which is, that's a very brisk pace for me. Like I definitely ended up cranking out a lot more of them than I normally would, which was of course awesome.

Thibaud:            07:34          There's a great energy in that and you know, people try and things and breaking things. And as you try to fix them, you try to improve them. So a lot of sort of the bad, which was the issues I'd build as read into ended up being good because now there's so many more things that you can do within the worlds. So for me it was kind of perfect because I think had there been much more interest in much more building, I, I might've died a little bit, it wouldn't have been impossible to keep up with. But as, as was, it was pretty perfect. I mean it was definitely hard and a little bit stressful because budgets are popping up and it was trying to fix things as fast as possible. And as I mentioned earlier, there were more of them than I would have liked of course, but also more than anticipated. But in the end I think it it, we really ended up with a much stronger editor as a result.

Eric:               08:17          And how about you Addison?

Addison:            08:18          So nothing with the world builder editor itself really went wrong. The main thing for me was a large part of it was time with as the month progressed. But besides that it was kind of just out of nowhere ideas and stuff just kind of like stopped like coming to me it was, it started to get a little harder to build as the month progressed and I felt like it was kind of dwindling a little bit. But what definitely went right was I would say the enjoyment. Like I was everyday I got on like I get on Written Realms like multiple times a day just to check up on discord. And I just maybe like did a room or two here and there once every day or two. And there was some times like a day where I built like five, 10, maybe 15 rooms and I come back to it later. But it was, it was kind of just the enjoyment of being able to do something myself without like a defined path like games you would, you would play have,

Danny:              09:18          I do remember. So I was on the discord and at some point you had a family trip to Disneyland if I remember correctly. And you were on building while you were in line at Disneyland where you not?

Addison:            09:36          Yes, I was. So we were there from eight in the morning to almost midnight and most of the lines we had FastPasses but that one line was about an hour and a half wait. And I was on my phone like, hey, this is a perfect time and this is just the perfect scenario. So I just started building the rooms.

Danny:              09:56          Which, which ride was it? Was it tower terror or, what is it that mountain railroad thing?

Addison:            10:02          I was with my mom and sister. They really wanted to go on the toy story one that went, took so long. It was the toy story one where you like, go on the little thing, shoot the targets as you move along. I was kind of standing there just like, this is so stupid. I really don't want to do this.

Danny:              10:19          So the world, the world you've built is called The Hallowed Outcasts. Was there any inspiration, any specific piece of literature or other game that you were really drawing from when you built this or, or was this just something that, you know, you just felt that you wanted to build this story out?

Addison:            10:36          Definitely. Yeah, so there's a game that I've played technically all my life, like I've played since I was like five or six. It's called Adventure Quest. It was a game originally like on the browser. They've come out with like adventure quest, world's dragon, but they've come out with a bunch of stuff. And just a few years ago, they came out with a new game Adventure Quest 3D. I mostly played for nostalgia in a way. And the main storyline is about like a massive, it's a massive skeleton, like his name is Vain and the thing he does, he snaps his finger, grabbs somebody and he uncreates them out of existence. And as I was building my world, like as I kinda started, I kind of had a little idea of what I wanted to call it, but it kind of drew inspiration from that because I kind of made the banner for my world like red and black pinkish color and in the game and adventure quest, he's like red and black shadow and I kind of built it off of that and I was kind of planning on each year for the NaMuBuMo contest. I kind of just build off of the story so it kinda left off on like a cliff hanger at this one and next year it'll kind of pick up like adventure quest kind of does.

Danny:              11:47          I think Eric and I are going to talk for a little bit because the contest was a little bigger than just written realms even though it was definitely a focal point. And that was something that I believe we made clear from the beginning that this was an invitation to try and build something out using that UI. But next year for year two and we are definitely doing next October as well and hopefully every October towards the future. One thing that was a big problem in, and another point of this of NaMuBuMo was to try and bring together the interactive fiction community and the mud community. And that didn't happen in any way, shape or form. I did post a few in a few places for IF, but the contest rules were kind of an attempt to mimic NaNoWriMo the national novel writing month and it's 50,000 word limit.

Danny:              12:45          And that was definitely misplaced. The IF community doesn't really think about rooms. We do, cause you know, that's what a MUD is. It's a bunch of interconnected rooms or at least coordinates which, you know, are just smaller rooms or just rooms with X, Y, Z. But the IF community doesn't think about that kind of thing. They think about stories and they think about locations and character significance. The hundred rooms, 10 or 20 NPCs was obviously a little misplaced. It was too MUDdy and not enough IF and some of the posts I made to the IF communities were rebuked a little bit for how stupid the rules were. And I don't think we had maybe even a single person come over from that community that wasn't already interested in MUDs. Next year will be significantly different. There will still be criteria. I feel like there has to be some kind of criteria. This is not just an open ended participation, but it will be friendlier to building a story as opposed to building a mechanical world. So that is a big thing and the point of next year, just like the point of this year, but it was just unrealized, is really to bring together all of the story building communities, the IF community, the people that make narrative centric games. And to that end, honestly I hope we can get some cross sponsorship from one of the foundations or one of the big IF communities and I hope to work together with a few more people and maybe we can make this a little bigger. Did you have any thoughts on post-mortem type things, Eric?

Eric:               14:22          Yeah, I mean I guess so my, most of my contribution, my entry to NaMuBuMo was done on the 30th and 31st as you do. So that was definitely the a hundred rooms was a bit of a stretch, but like that was kind of meant to be, that's like what the 50,000 words is. So I think feeling like it is a stretch to get to, it is good to keep, but definitely tweaking it I think so that we can pull in other communities. Like we had mentioned, you could even just make up like a, this was more of that discord where you've mentioned this, but like if you just want to make a set of like static HTML pages that just like describe about what you're seeing and like you interact with the NPC through just like javascript or whatever, like that would be a perfectly acceptable thing.

Eric:               15:05          And like that feels more like what I F would be, I think making it more amenable or whatever to having outside people join with better terms of vocabulary and, and whatnot would be good. And I definitely agree that we should make sure that there's some kind of like like make it a challenge, a personal challenge to yourself. Like, can I stretch this far? And it's not just, I'm just participating type of thing.

Eric:               15:29          So yeah. Speaking of the future, of course, how about the future of written realms Thibaud? Is there anything on the horizon now that you've gone through the massive backlog of bugs everyone's been throwing up at you in October?

Thibaud:            15:48          Oh my God, it's huge that I have a Trello board that's public and everyone who looks at it and just starts laughing cause it's like it's a screen upon screen up on the screen of things to do. I need to first do a little bit more and then will be more digestion. I don't know how else to call it, but basically one thing that I'm going to do is I stream twice a week on Twitch and one thing that I want to do is dedicate one episode per single-player world that got submitted for NaMuBuMo and then essentially play through them on Twitch and then upload them to YouTube. So we can have like have a record of what those worlds were like before the authors go in and polish them or improve them or you know, kind of take them away from their pristine NaMuBuMo mistakes.

Thibaud:            16:30          And after that I'm, I mean there's still a ton of things that builders would have liked to do that I kind of knew I wouldn't have time to implement it in October, but that would still be really, really good. Longterm things to have. A lot of those are based around basically like item interactions. So right now in realms the way that you make most things happen is through mob interactions. You can have mob reactions and you can have mop quests which gives you a lot of tools and you can make mobs invisible, which that gives you a ton of that lets you create custom commands and do all kinds of things. What's sort of missing is the ability for a player to enter a room with no mobile at all with just items and to be able to say pull the lever and have north open and, and that would sort of require a lot of pieces in place that are not currently in place.

Thibaud:            17:23          So I want to do a lot of things around world interactability essentially. And, and even maybe trying to get to a point where you could just create like one room and have so many interactions with it that it would feel a bit more like an IF than like a mud, right? It would just be interacting through some containerless environment just by commands. And many relations of your surroundings. A lot of builders have given really, really good ideas with that that I'd like to build out. But those would take a little bit of time and beyond that I want to keep. So there's always these two big tensions in realms. Like the first one is making the content better, you know, world-building and all of that. And the other one is making better world builder tools. And given that for most of October and even a couple of weeks before then I was really focusing on supporting builders and giving them everything they needed.

Thibaud:            18:10          I have not done too much with our flagship world and I do want to turn my eye a little bit more towards that. Specifically I want to finish the assassin class, which is sort of like the fourth archetype that we designed our game around. And that's been sort of missing since the start. So we have a stat right now called dexterity, which is for all intents and purposes, useless currently. Well it gives you some stuff, but it doesn't really have like a true reason to be unless this fourth classes in. So I really want to add that and make that kind of part of the core game play and then hopefully keep developing both tracks in parallel. I'm trying to develop features that would be good for builders and then use the unbroken world, our multiplayer world, to test them out. So hopefully a lot of both, but a yeah ton to do, which is great problem to have. But yeah,

Danny:              18:57          Has this experience, have you caught the bug, the builder bug? Do you feel like you might build some other worlds in the future?

Addison:            19:06          Definitely. So I am, I'm not bragging, but I was, I think I was like the second or third patron and I think I was the first to subscribe to the world building because as soon as I saw like written realms I just just had this thing overcome me. Like, like the bug, like I said earlier, just everything just started kind of like come into me, like just overflowing with ideas. And I actually created a world oh, like three or four months ago, I think I like a lot of people will play it. I've been meaning to get back to it, but everyone's been asking me about it and discord. Everyone's asked me and stuff, and I've kind of put it on the back burner for a bit. But if you play through the hollowed outcasts, there's kind of like a little tidbit about that world. I'm going to start building it more and it's kind of on and off for me. But lately I've gotten a huge, just urge to just build and not really play.

Eric:               20:04          All right. Well, thanks both for coming on to the this episode of Titans of Text.

Thibaud:            20:10          Yeah. Thank you. My pleasure.

Addison:            20:12          Thanks for having me.