Pascal the Builder

Featuring once again, that weird text based game, Cleft of Dimensions.

I was "hired" as a builder, which is a low tier staff member who creates new areas. I say "hired" because I definitely am not being paid.

Staff members are called immortals, which is slightly fitting as they actually can't be killed, at least under normal circumstances.

I have been a very busy beaver, and I built an area in the game based off of Animal Crossing.

I meant to post about this sooner, and maybe do some updates regularly because of it, but frankly there isn't that much to say about the actual process. I've been entirely engrossed in this for almost two weeks, now. It's really been my main focus, but even the higher ups are impressed with how quickly I put it together.

Building occurs within the game, while online. You create rooms, describe them, describe things in them, and link them together to create the area. You make objects, mobiles, and then programs to make all the mobiles do things and interact with the world.

You describe all of the objects and mobiles and bring the area to life. Every little key to the proper immersion, making sure to keep people from being able to break the area, and even putting things into place for people who could manage to mess up in crazy ways you wouldn't expect, is put in purposefully by the person putting it together.

If you code or design things, I'm sure this isn't news to you, but this is the first time I've really applied any kind of thing resembling coding in an actual situation. It's not actually coding, I know, but it does involve things like entirely not working or doing something completely odd and unexpected when done incorrectly.

My area is actually almost entirely complete, and right now it's just going through testing and is being reviewed for possible tweaks, errors, and quality concerns.

I'd post screenshots or something, but... they all kind of just look like this.

I love this game and I'm very excited about the area I built, but it's strange to try and talk about it with people who are unfamiliar with MUDs.

I realized this when I tried to type up this post almost two weeks ago, and several times again when I tried to talk about it with one of my friends.

Once I'm done this, I'll probably hold off on building another area right away. Honestly, I might have used my best idea as my first one. We'll see!