A while back, while laid up with a cold (and even more so with cold medicine) I started work on a new version of Endless Lands, based on a couple of years spent thinking about the problems the original version had. My first attempt to redress them brought its own problems, but it had enough good ideas that I kept kicking them around and have decided to move forward with it. Right now I'm using time to work on it as a "carrot" to help make sure I get my actual work done during the day.

What I have now is technically playable but it's about halfway between the problematic original revision and where it needs to be. It also doesn't have any more world content than the character creation area, the Temple of Awakening (which functions as the first town), a short length of road and a bandit camp... but I've got a fairly decent map editor put together using BYOND's grid control that makes adding new areas fairly quick.

The new version keeps a lot of what made the old version interesting, including the ability to play as a animal companion-type character. I've addressed some of the problems of balancing a cat or raven by treating them as heroic exemplars of their species in the same way that a fighter or magician isn't a typical human.

I've made some changes to combat to make it more interesting than the typical MUD. While your character will still automatically attack and defend, it plays out slowly, at a rate of 10 seconds for a normal attack, in order to give human players a chance to react as events unfold and select special attacks and other actions (which you get based on your race and class) to sub in in place of your regular action. Great big special attacks currently function as immediate interrupts, under the theory that they should always be "game changers" when you pull out the big guns.

The combat system also involves ranged combat, with range consisting of the Binary Grover System of "Near" and "Far." When you're engaged with opponents up close, you're restricted from escaping the area or changing opponents to ones who aren't up close with you until you successfully retreated. This allows fighter-types to grab the attention of the monsters, letting archers and spellcasters off the hook.

I've had a couple of missteps in development... like I said, my first stab at a remake was problematic.

First, I started out with the idea of the world being a random set of paths connecting randomized environments, and thus being truly "endless", but I realized it was taking so much work trying to make them seem handcrafted and unique (with varied success) that I might as well do that anyway. The whole "thrill of exploration" element's hard to sell if the world is just a bunch of repeating flavor text in different configurations. Luckily, as I said, the grid control makes for a handy in-game map editor.

Second, character creation initially involved way too many steps, because you had your race abilities and your class abilities and they were both divided between "Powers" (active use) and "Skills")(passive use/bonuses to things anybody can try to do), and then secondary skills, and then special abilities (roughly analogous to D&D feats). I eventually decided to make racial abilities not be point based... you just get them... and stop making a distinction between "Powers" and "Skills".

Third, while players select their next action and it queues it up for their next turn, monsters randomly pick one right when their turn comes. I did this because it was easier and because, since their "strategy" consists of weighted probabilities and responses to a few triggers, it didn't seem necessary to do more. But then I realized one of the big advantages to slower combat would be to allow players to see monsters' moves coming and pick their responses accordingly. That's the one I haven't fixed yet, because it's going to involve fundamental changes to the biggest and oldest surviving part of the code base, and I haven't fully decided yet how to best implement it.

Those are the big ones, anyway.

I'll be making a post a day about the game, basically "thinking out loud" about what I've been working on or throwing up a draft of the player's guide on some aspect of the game. I've been fairly scrupulous about writing that as I go, which has helped me to spot some problems... sitting there and analyzing the character creation options from a "help the player" point of view helped me realize some of the options were redundant, while others were massively more useful than others.