Entirely new online text game needs design feedback!

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02 Dec 2013 22:56 #1 by BigScary
I'm one of a team of two software engineers (Microsoft, Adobe) and an IT pro who have been spending their free time to develop an entirely new online text game over the past few months. We're calling it "Tohm" (pronounced "Tome"), and it's not based on any existing codebase. I hope you all in the text gaming community support us with your suggestions and criticisms so we can make Tohm the best it can be! We'd really appreciate your honest and thoughtful feedback, especially now while we work toward our open alpha release, when even big changes are still doable.

To prove this isn't just another pipe dream, I've started a series of videos demonstrating our progress. Here's the first:



Some key design elements:

1. Tactical combat, with emphasis on decision making and risk management over speed of execution.
2. Fewer rooms with a very high level of detail, including dynamic text for day/night, regional weather patterns, and four seasons.
3. Combo-based skills and spell-casting, so players can experiment and discover while memorizing fewer verbs.
4. Very low barrier to entry - flexible command line syntax, lots of verb aliases covering common diction.
5. Fewer, more significant battles (grinding sucks).
6. Epic quests, not lists of chores.
7. Skills grow based on usage alone - no tables to study or skill points to allocate.

Our wiki documents design motivations, and is here: tohm.wikia.com

Our forums for design discussion are here: tohm.forumotion.com

Also, if you know of any other active communities of text gamers I should reach out to, please tell me. Thank you very much!

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03 Dec 2013 21:30 #2 by BigScary
Apologies, I don't know how I landed this thread in the tutorials area. Was intending it for the game design category. :unsure:

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04 Dec 2013 03:33 #3 by plamzi
Topic moved--no worries.

If you haven't already, consider using the portal web app as a building platform for your game client. Based on your early previews, I think it can bring a lot of value, and it's totally open-source.

If you want to build something from the ground up, some of my feedback has to do with audience and presentation. The parchment background looks cool for a minute, but after that, it becomes too busy for something sitting behind scrolling text.

If you are aiming at players with prior knowledge of MUDs, consider that the first question they will ask is whether they can play the game in their favorite client.

If you are targeting primarily people with no prior knowledge of MUDs, consider building a web-based client that is a lot more visual, and/or takes full advantage of modern web technologies for text presentation, such as dialogs, context menus, tabs, windows, etc.
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07 Dec 2013 00:58 #4 by BigScary
Thanks for your feedback! I will look into the portal client. We'll probably add support for popular legacy-style clients down the road, and we'll certainly add different styles for our web client that players can easily switch between. Now that we have one working client, we're laser-focused on adding game logic, because there's no point in supporting the world of clients when there's no game to play. :)

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