One of the things I really appreciate about the coding that went into LOGD 0.9.7 is the way it provides classic old BBS-style tracking of all your visitors.Not only is it extremely well written, it is also a great security feature to protect your normal users and visitors from sleazeballs just trying to log on to cause trouble.
The iteration I used to write Kleeshae Caverns is quite old now but it's interesting to think how much more sophisticated the tracking must be for eg Facebook, let alone some of these sites where there is a forum, particularly one where people are encouraged to behave inappropriately, but where their every move is tracked and logged. Just imagine if such a forum was actually run by a criminal enterprise or even a debt collection company! Just think of all the harm that would be being done by the creepy people running it in secret.
Anyway, I just wanted to leave a note saying thank you to all the great writers and designers of Green Dragon, and also of course shout out to Seth Able Robinson, who, a long long time ago, wrote a "door game" called Legend of the Red Dragon aka LoRD or LORD. Back then the Internet still very much had a capital 'I' and BBSes connected users to the wider online world. Graphical user interfaces were very much a thing of the future (albeit having first been conceived of in the 1920s and actually put into practice in the 1960s) and LORD was one of those transitional experiences for a lot of BBS users. The game was simple in approach but sophisticated in effect. Village <-> Forest <-> Training <-> Shops <-> Healing...
Writing modules or addons for LORD became a cottage industry and directly led to the current LOGD community.
My version of LOGD is based on an older version because the newer version is becoming a bit too confining for me. I wanted to turn an essentially textual game into a graphical game, but keep a storybook approach so that the pictures enhance the text rather than replace it as in most MMORPGs.
Hopefully the players are enjoying Kleeshae Caverns although I know the first little area is quite dull. I sort of wanted it to be as I have found in the past that dropping people right in the deep end is alienating. Also not so many people are used to actually reading and understanding especially when playing a game so I wanted to scale up the experience in that sense too.
On! On!
-Jonathan
