ndguarino

Yeah, Telnet will definitely be a lot of work if you do decide to go for it. For cooldown bars and such, I'll recommend using a subnegotiation protocol for all that (GMCP is the one widely used these days, all the major clients support it to some extent and it's effectively just a 'string + json blob' payload), and my experience is often "if you make it available, it will be built" with MUDs.

I'm extremely happy to hear that visually impaired players are accounted for. It was always one of my personal 'hills to die on' in MUD development.

As for Patreon, it's just personal preference. I just want to be able to put in my card details and go - Patreon makes me juggle Yet Another Account and, if you aren't a Patreon user already, the time to get a subscription is highly increased. Anecdotally, I'm not the only one I know who feels this way. I spent years just avoiding anything that made me sign up for a Patreon account just to avoid the hassle of it, and only caved in to support a friend's project. I know some who will still just see Patreon and run the other direction. It also might just be me, but I have horrible luck with services that integrate with it - it won't link the patreon account or recognise that I'm paying, and I need to get manual intervention on getting the thing I'm subscribing to.

MUD player for ~20 years, (previously) administrator/developer for ~5. First of all, great work on pushing this out and making a usable product, especially one built for people who aren't entirely familiar with writing software (which is often the big hurdle for starting a new IF game or MUD).

I haven't had time to play with it, but I do have three (or 2.5) pieces of feedback based off reading the documentation.

1. Service subscriptions are solid, and using them for multiplayer access is entirely reasonable here. $15/mo isn't actually very much for that, especially since hosting is handled, so that's an exquisitely low barrier to entry for that. That said, Patreon is a big turn-off for a lot of people (including myself, though I'm not necessarily your target audience either).

2. Lack of telnet connection on multiplayer worlds is a big hurdle. Most MUDs/MUSHes/MOOs are telnet-based, and by not making this a way to connect, you are effectively turning away ~30 years of software written, and a good percentage of the people who have grown used to this software. In the MUD I worked on, I still had players using zMUD because it's what they preferred and what they had things built for, despite it not having been maintained for years and not being able to use several features of the MUD as a result (xterm colour, MXP, GMCP and other telnet subnegotiation protocols).

2.5. VIPs (Visually Impaired Persons/Players) and accessibility. This is one of the largest userbases for a MUD or IF game, as other games that are accessible to them are somewhat rare. I cannot speak to how screenreader-friendly your web client is, but telnet access lets them use clients that already are compatible and integrated with screenreaders.

2.75. Players with terrible internet. Many countries have great internet. Many countries, and even parts of countries that would otherwise have great internet, do not. A lot of players I've met in MUDs played them not because they were enthusiasts, but because they were more friendly to slow connections with high latency. Throttling my connection to some test settings I used for testing data flow to a couple players so I could recommend settings to them and test things for them, your client and the initial screen of the game you have on your homepage linked to the "Play" button is 44s.

There is a chance none of these are concerns for you, and that is an entirely fair decision - you can't develop for everybody. But I hope this is useful feedback.