[MUD-Dev] Crafting/Creation systems

[Dave Rickey]

From: "John Buehler" <johnbue at msn.com>

> Oh sure.  I agree with this.  Note that I consider the interfaces
> in EverQuest and Asheron's Call to be quite cumbersome and, at the
> same time, not very entertaining.  I think that Dark Age of
> Camelot really helped me to distill the importance of making the
> crafting operation itself entertaining.  Camelot didn't make the
> crafting process annoying and painful, so the pain was removed.
> But what was left was just the creation of zillions of items in
> order to advance the character's skill.  It reminded me that
> crafting really is a lot of fun and can be entertaining in and of
> itself.  To be able to create things and then sell them, have a
> positive impact on the game world at large, etc, is gravy beyond
> that.

My initial design, when I was defining the "perfect" crafting
system, essentially amounted to having a specialized subgame for
each trade, you'd make a sword or piece of armor by manipulating a
virtual hammer and monitoring the color of virtual metal, trying to
hammer it into the perfect shape.  Then I started cutting things
away based on how much programmer time I could actually get for it,
and wound up with a functional, but uninspiring, core system of
ingredients and outputs.  Realities of the process being what they
are, I wasn't even able to get the entire system in (no coding time
for magical trades, which needed special outputs), and had to turn
it over to others about 8 months ago.

--Dave


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