Welcome back to the Bardo:
It's been a while!
I successfully ran The Bardo's "Alpha Test 1" period from around the time of my last post in this thread until about 2 months ago which was somewhere north of 6 months of relatively uninterrupted uptime, although also very few players stopped by to check it out.
But that is okay, it was an uptime success, and a great test of the new hardware that the Bardo is running on. Which also happens to be rated for "winter months extra heating," and that is part of why the Bardo will be coming back online very soon!
the magical fairy land that my game lives inside of
While the game has been powered down, I've been doing a lot of vibe dev on smaller projects, learning to trust AI, etc, and so forth. Basically learning whether or not AI still "makes a lot of mistakes," which it turns out it basically does not. Worldview updated.
one of the many side projects I've made recently
After making many tiny games and going on (an ongoing) detour into homebrew development with AI -- I finally decided to let it make a proper web client for The Bardo, and also maybe have it help me with some long-standing bugs in my hand-rolled server codebase.
So right now the game has 94 playable character races and I've successfully implemented placeholder pixel art for each race using the aforementioned magic computer-wizard toolset.
I think AI is still pretty mid at compressed pixel art, so I do plan to get in there by hand to make things better. With that said, it has been very useful for doing a first layer imagining of many of the characters.
In addition to adding character art, the web client will feature many new mouse-based interactions to hopefully make my text MUD more accessible to people who don't have a history with terminal based typing games including:
-Click to move (first step on the path to mobile + tap to move)
-Hypertext interactions (click on text in the game to do simple interactions instead of having to type those commands)
-Built in accessibility settings for screen readers, high contrast, etc.
-General QoL settings and game information built into the client in more accessible ways than the in-game help files.
I then hope to port those features back to the Godot client and potentially still target a launch on Steam alongside the web client, with slightly more GPU intensive post processing and such in the Godot experience.
Goals like Steam launch, as well as true mobile support will likely not come until after Alpha 2, which will hopefully begin within the next month or two and hopefully run until the weather heats back up.
Thank you for reading about my game!
Cheers,
-m