Blind Luck MUD Development Diary, Entry 3: Experience, Levels & Stats

Note: If this is your first time reading this Development Diary, where I tell the story of how I’m building a text-based online fantasy multiplayer game, then I suggest you start with Entry 1 and go from there. This game is intended to be accessible to anyone, including the visually impaired who use screen readers to read the screen out loud to them.

Since the last Developer Diary Entry, I’ve focused on the character aspect of the game. I’ve added experience points, levels, and stats (which I previously called “attributes” — dexterity, wisdom, etc). Let me show you what I’ve done.

Image by Author, using the Inkarnate mapping tool.

Levels and experience points

The first thing I did was create the level command. When a player starts the game for the first time, their character will be level 0 as shown here:

> level 
You are level 0. 
You have 0 experience points, and need another 500 for next level.

The “>” before “level” indicates that this line is input from the player. So as we can see, this new level command shows us that we are level 0, and how many experience points we need for the next level. The obvious question, then, is — how do we get these “experience points” so that we can advance to the next level and become more powerful? Well, eventually there…