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Blind Luck MUD Development Diary, Entry 8: Dynamic Descriptions
Welcome back to this ongoing series of articles where I publish my thoughts on the text-based fantasy online roleplaying game I’m developing. If you’re new here, you might want to start with the first entry.
I like text. I find it fascinating how through a long sequence of words, a skilled author can seeminly create entire worlds which the readers are invited to visit. As my fellow writers will attest, this craft is not easy. You have to choose the right words — and only the right words — to convey your world as efficiently as possible. When it comes to a game such as Blind Luck MUD, or indeed any other MUD (a game of this type), this becomes imperative. Especially in the case of this particular MUD, since it aims to be as accessible to the visually impaired who use a screenreader to read the text of the game out loud. This means that the game has to choose its words wisely indeed, to avoid needless repetitions and other annoyances that the sighted among us can easily skip but which might be more cumbersome to someone who has to listen to the text.
For this reason, I have decided that my game needs dynamic descriptions for its rooms (again, each discrete location in a MUD is typically called a room regardless of whether it is indoors or outdoors). This means that instead of the game having to first describe…
