It’s crazy to think that it’s been six years since I’ve thought about returning to the Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) world. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve thought about it multiple times per week between MMORPG gaming servers/clients (World of Warcraft, Ragnarok Online..) and text-based games. I’ve always had projects in the way, or at least excuses.

… But I’ve been feeling the itch.

There’s something about the simplicity of ASCII text and colors that make it so easy to create with. Sure, you still need to think of design/UX, but you can actually be pretty bad at design, yet still convey something that can be iterated on and improved. What feels like taking a step backwards from graphical to textual, also feels a bit liberating and lets you accelerate your development cycles a bit to focus on the actual systems instead of the looks.

That’s what’s led me to want to tackle writing a MUD engine again: the GRIM Engine

Wrapped in those excuses/delays, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and now I want to get something rough started. My focus has been around the Bevy Entity-Component-System (ECS) approach– weirdly enough, six years ago, I was trying to create a similar/ugly version of Entity and very loosely-typed Events with Python. While I never sought perfection, it’s nice to see a much cleaner approach from Bevy to give some foundation to build upon.

And while my focus is on a text-based MUD server short-term, I’ve always wanted to learn how to create a clone of Ragnarok Online to learn more about client/server protocols for gaming– which this engine (or at least the ECS) might be able to also help with eventually tackling.

I’ll try my best to provide updates as they come.