'Sup, Internet. You look nice today.
Not going to screw around, here’s what I kind of want to make. I want to make a game about exploration. I want to make a game where the whole point is just to go places, and find new things, and have new experiences. I want to make the whole world as wide open as possible. Like, you can go into the city, OR, you can go off into the woods and live off the land. You can build a house and live there. You can punch a guy and steal his stuff. You can eat a weird plant you found on the side of the road. You can be elected president. You can abuse the power of being president, and bomb another city into smoldering rubble. You can throw rocks at people, for no good reason. You can make a sword, then sell that and use the profits to buy a sweet hat. You can swim out into the ocean and drown. You can make more swords, buy a better hat that allows you to breathe underwater, and walk under the ocean until you come out on a different continent. You could not do that and just make a boat, like a sane person would. You could set your boat on fire. Whether or not it is a good idea or a bad idea is irrelevant. As long as it is internally consistent, YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO DO IT. You want to find the key? Great. You want to pick the lock? Okay. You want to bust the door down? Sure. You want to just go in though the window? Yeah, why not? You want to burn down the house and everything in it? DO THAT.
Now this would be mostly one player, with a few multiplayer parts thrown in, mainly just to stop the inevitable tide of players burning and pillaging literally everything just because they can. But if YOU want to scour the globe completely clean of every living thing in existence, then YOU get the satisfaction of doing that because someone else didn’t beat you to it first.
I want the scale of open-worldness to basically match that of any big-budget commercial game. And I want to make it. Using the Internet, my brain, my computer in front of me, and my own two hands. Because I am crazy person.
First of all, I know that this will take a stupid amount of effort. Like, a really, REALLY crazy stupid amount of effort. Also, the odds of me actually making something anything like I’m envisioning, let alone something on this scale, is about obscenely-large-number to one. But for now, I’m going to ignore that, in favor of trying to do it anyway. People have done this before. Dwarf fortress was made by a dude and his brother.
Oh, and this is the crucial thing.
It has to be made of words.
It has to be text based, through and through. Sure, there will probably be graphics here and there, layouts, inventories and whathaveyou, but it’s going to be mostly words, and the reason for this is simple: I can make words. I have no great skill for drawing or voice acting or animation or whatever else, but I can write, so that’s what I’m going to do.
Anyway, enough ranting, here’s what I actually need to ask you fine folks of the internet: HOW IN THE HELL DO I DO THIS.
I know about stuff on a smaller scale, I’ve used twine, inform, and a little bit of JavaScript to make a few serviceable half-games, but absolutely nothing on this scale. So any and all recommendations for how I might feasibly do this, MUDs, platforms, design tips, tutorials, examples, advice, and whatever else you can think of, I’d love to hear it.
Stay gold, Internet
- possiblySerious
P. S. Also, yes, I am aiming WAY too high, thank you for noticing, especially considering my complete and utter lack of skill, practice, and focus, but guess what. I DON’T CARE. I’M GOING TO TRY ANYWAY. I REFUSE TO ACHNOWLEDGE FAILURE AS AN OPTION.