I think I understand the gist of the inquiry. Traditional MUDs have often instantly loaded a prompt and said, “What should we call you?” And you can type a name, and if that name is not taken, it says “Welcome Hidnook, you are sitting at the table in a loud tavern, there is a shady character on the far end of the room, what do you want to do first?” And you’re off to playing. Then after a few minutes or hour of gameplay it will prompt you to “set a password if you want to secure your progress” and maybe a little later “set an email if you want, it’ll let you recover your password later if you forget it.” And slowly ease the player into giving more info but totally optional. I get that.
I appreciate both of your questions because part of this phase of alpha/beta/release planning is checking adoption and retention and play through. And, I’m aware of this history in the industry, but I’m hopeful that we’re in an era where people are comfortable making accounts. I did read another thread on these forums that had a long discussion around that, where someone (maybe actually you, Hidnook lol.) said they didn’t want to make 20 accounts trying to find a new game they were interested in playing.
So, I get that. This is alpha, I have been pouring hundreds of hours into this and had to draw the line somewhere. I’ve drawn the line here and calling this Act 1, Alpha complete. One of my possible beta plans is to include a telnet capability. I have not figured out the full plan there for how to secure the player’s account, it may just be a less secure account and once you have a regular web account, then your characters would only be accessible through the web account, but if you only create a character through telnet, and set a password there, then you could continue to access it through telnet. That might be a reasonable compromise to bring in the folks that want to use those types of clients.
My focus on this phase was to build the storyline, and build the foundational commands, and build the environment and world features, and the account/web client is almost vanilla php+laravel with a single page that has the javascript user interface. My vision for this is “huge” in that, I am trying to bring some modern techniques and gameplay to the text based world. Meaning, I’m trying to create enjoyable, approachable, but interesting and tricky encounters that parallel the experience (albiet in text) as some large commercial games. I think the idea is to mirror what other people are doing well.
Yes, of course you could use a pseudonym. You can put whatever you want there for the name, that’s “just” the client account, not the character that you create. (Interesting point, I hadn’t even thought that wouldn’t be clear, but I can make that more clear that this is just the login/account level. You’ll create your character once connected.
In any case, you can put a fake name and fake email and random password and it’ll just work as long as you use the same random email and random password next time. If you want, you can use these credentials to test. (I’ll shut this account down at some point, but it’ll get you through the login, and you can create a character. Note if two people connect at the same time, it’ll bounce the previous session out.)
Test One
test@one.com
testone1
Test Two
test@two.com
testtwo2
enrym.com/play
And once you’re logged in, it has the more traditional/expected create your character prompts.
Thanks for the critical feedback, I hear you. And I may need to change it to feel more comfortable for the potential player base.
