TL;DR: Go play it, dawg.

The Jedi Problem

This all started because a friend sent me a link to this excellent noclip documentary. The noclip crew interviews an original team member behind Star Wars: Galaxies, the greatest sandbox MMO of all time, and goes into how the team dealt with (or failed to deal with) the fact that everyone wants to be a Jedi in a world that canonically can’t have many Jedi. It’s a great documentary. You should check it out.

Friend: https://youtu.be/UAv0LYLQi5c @Friday you may enjoy this
Me: tragic that there can never be another mmo like this

SWG came about in an era where the line between the MUDs of the past and the MMOs of the future was visible in every player interaction. Runescape was also a child of this era. The original vanilla WoW too, to a lesser degree. SWG had a chat option called DikuMUD, which would format your chat window MUD-style. The slash commands, still present in MMOs, came from these proto-MMO online shared text adventures.

The problem the SWG team ran into was, in my view, that the MMO players of the era were simply not hardcore enough to face up to Jedi properly. Their original, beautiful, vision, turned Jedi into a roguelike mode. Something hard to get a character into, that activated permadeath, where your eventual death would turn into bragging rights about how far you got. For gamers raised on nethack and aardwolf this makes all the sense in the world. But, to be fair, if you were coming from Everquest it’s pretty jarring.

SWG, and other MMOs of the era, also did something many (most? all?) MMOs have since abandoned: it forced you to talk to people. If you wanted to figure out how to be a Jedi, you had to talk to people. If you wanted to go somewhere, you had to wait for a shuttle to show up, and while you were waiting you talked to people. In the original WoW, you sat on a zeppelin and had to talk to people. In the original Runescape, you’d get stuck on a quest and have to… talk to people. MMOs were social, because MUDs were social. They had to be! You only had text to work with!

I have been toying with, for years on and off, the idea of a nethack style game you could play with other people. Not quite a MUD, which is too much of a high friction interface for the modern user, and not a proper game with graphics, because I can’t draw, but something in between. I’ve written a few prototypes over the years, some more MUD and less nethack, some more nethack and less MUD, but none of them getting very far. The issue I kept running into was that all these projects quickly turned from designing a game (fun) and implementing game systems (very fun) into building netcode, managing server infrastructure, and other boring, tedious tasks.

How quickly my lamentation became joy when I realized, shortly after finishing that noclip documentary…

Me: fuck it I have a claude license

In The Beginning, There Was MUD

How, then, to vibe a game into existence? I’ve messed around with vibe coding a bit, for career driven reasons, and have experienced enough of it to know it sucks at anything that has a visual element to it. How can an LLM drive a test of something it can’t see? Poorly, is the answer.

The solution was to make the entire game playable like a MUD, over the wire. The design is purely server-authoritative, where the game’s simulation runs across several shards. The client sends commands, which the server executes or rejects, and sends a message back. The GUI paints an interface for the player based on the contents of these replies, but it is (theoretically) possible to play the whole thing by command only. This lets the LLM write and drive tests for things like movement, combat, quest completion, even minigames, in a way that mostly solves the problems of getting AI to work on a game. Mostly. There’s still a ton of manual development and testing.

As I went along, using the command line wore on me, so I built a TUI. After a while, the TUI started having really irritating limitations, so I settled on a Rust egui, compiled to wasm, distributed on this very website. The MUD bones are still visible in many parts of the game, which is confusing and inconsistent in a way that feels very true to the spirit of the old MMOs that inspired me.

Friend: friday is making scifi runescape from first principles

The game now has quests, NPCs, combat, skills, interactions, markets, and many of the other features you’d expect from a game like this. And bugs. So very many bugs. I playtest everything, and still they slip past me. My friends have been kind enough to mostly report them to me so I can hammer them out.

I Caught a Vibe

“What the fuck, man?” I hear you say, misgendering unintentionally with a vulgar idiom. “I can’t believe you’re using AI for this. How am I supposed to trust you?” I mean, don’t. I’m not asking for your credit card here, nor would I for a project like this. I’m a Linux hacker by trade, not a web app security specialist, so don’t reuse an old password on here either (you’re already using a password manager, right?).

“No dude,” you continue, “I mean, couldn’t you have written this yourself?” Well no, I couldn’t have. I mean, literally yes I could have, and have started to many times. But there’s a lot of solved-problem boilerplate code involved in wiring up projects like this. And LLMs are really, really, good at all that boring crap. It was do it myself never, or do it with an LLM today.

I have a professional interest in LLMs. People run these things on Linux systems, and I am paid to defend them. I am contractually obligated to understand how these harnesses work, so it does pay off for me to use them on my own time the same way I mess with my own Linux systems on my own time. Although I retain the right to privately complain if I see someone doing something silly or foolish with them, a right irl friends know I exercise regularly.

On the environmental impact of AI, spending as much time outdoors as I do has made it abundantly clear that you can’t be alive without leaving a trace. I was vegan for a while. Not having a kid has a huge, positive, environmental impact. Living in a detached house has a huge, negative, one. Every time I pull a weed from my garden I am reminded of the forest and the meadow that once stood here. I am politically active in ways that attempt to curb these impacts, and that I don’t feel are appropriate to share online. We all have to draw a line somewhere. Mine is somewhere past “LLM used for writing code,” and before “gives money to JK Rowling.” Yours is up to you.

jk… unless??

“Okay, but you still could’ve paid an artist!” Well, I’d like to, but I’m not going to for a silly little hobby project nobody is interested in. I certainly wouldn’t charge money for slop. If by some weird confluence of fate people do start playing this thing, I’d love to pay an actual writer to clean things up, and an actual artist to build assets.

Until then, I will keep hacking away at this thing. Adding little features and little tasks to my little toybox that anyone is invited to come stomp around in.