MUD world design

I was thinking about game world design, in particular how MUDs have done things over the years, and thought I'd share. :)

MUDs have all kinds of worlds, and some of them are extremely detailed and cohesive, others are comical mishmashes of themes, and still others seem disjointed. So, in my quest to build a new game world for myself, I figured I'd take a moment to ponder how and why things happen the way they do.

Most MUDs are room based, and I'll stick to that as a design paradigm, because it's simple. Text based MUDs can be done with coordinates only, but one has to develop ways to "hang" descriptions over swaths of terrain, and then have LOS rules and such... too much to deal with for this discussion. Further, most MUDs don't have any real concept of distance. In a traditional MUD, rooms are connected to each other via exits in the cardinal directions, and the only sense of scale you have is what the description offers your imagination.

So, how does one go about building a world? I think tradition gives us two common paths... Top Down, or Bottom Up. I would suggest that more MUDs use Bottom Up design, as it requires less planning and structure.

You've wandered out of Old Midgaard, down the road and entered... Smurf Village??? WTF??? You've just met Bottom Up design! In this kind of system, the game admins generally come up with an idea for a starting village of sorts, so they build it, and then they build a few things around it, and they open the game up to players and encourage people to become builders as quickly as possible. Those builders will come up with random ideas for "cool" zones, and then the admins will decide where to link them in, building a room or three as an enterance, and adding a few signs or other hints so people can find the new content. The world grows out from a central point, and quite often there isn't much cohesive design.

That said, some games DO enforce theme, and DO try to place zones logically, so the ice tundra isn't 3 rooms away from the desert. But, as years go by, people get lazy and soon things just don't quite mesh up anymore. Since there is generally no hand-drawn map of the world, it's also difficult to visualize where 100+ zones actually fit in relation to each other.

The other side of the coin is the Top Down method. In this case, the admins think up an idea for a whole world, and sketch it out on paper until they get a level of detail that they're happy with. Usually, you also write out some back-story and history to populate the world with various nations and creatures. At this point, you select a starting area and start building.

Since the world is already designed, builders are encourages to select types of creatures/civilizations to work on, or areas on the map that interest them. It's generally best if they choose adjacent zones to ones that already exist, otherwise some form of portal or other transit must be provided until the connecting zones are fleshed out.

Adding random new ideas to these worlds is often tricky, since it requires the admins find a place on the map it can fit AND have it make some sense with respect to the surrounding populations. That can often be solved by having the game developed on one continent and adding totally new things to "discovered" islands, or in the "uncharted regions".

Next time, I'll show how you can have your cake and eat it too... that is, you can have a giant world map, develop parts of it that are not adjacent, and still let people wander back and forth without hokey magic spells or riding "Da Bus".