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The Bardo Devlog [Open Source Game Dev]

A topic by damijin created Mar 04, 2026 Views: 446 Replies: 2
Viewing posts 1 to 3
(1 edit)

Hello devlog forum readers, I decided to start a thread here for my personal passion project, The Bardo!


   it's an online text game!

I recently updated the Godot client for the game, and I publish all of the client source code on the game page for the project.

The Bardo is a text based multiplayer online game, technically a "MUD", but it uses the UTF-8 glyph set (emoji) and the Unifont open source universal bitmap font to render consistent "graphics" in terminal using text characters. This allows the game itself to take the form of more of an overhead Rogue-like rather than a traditional "read the room and type commands" style MUD.

The game can be accessed from any Telnet client and does not need to be played using the Godot client at the game page. It is "client agnostic" and I hope in the long run players will create their own clients to interact with the game.


Although I have not yet released the server code publicly, I do also plan to release the server itself -- custom written by myself in Java over the last several years. If you have any questions or run into any difficulty trying to test out the game, please let me know!



Next plans for the game include: 

-Adding (clickable) hypertext to the client so less typing is required.

-Adding the ability to click the map to move in the Godot client rather than moving with WASD or arrow keys

-Making the client work on the web

-Making the client work on mobile (eventually)

-Continued gameplay side development


Thanks for checking out the project!

-m

(1 edit)

Some updates that have happend this month on The Bardo


"


  • Players can "bond" to each other to create a party. Parties can be of any size, and will split XP and dust evenly between friends
  • Adding a lot more buffs and heals
    • Various attack abilities (howl, flute, trumpet, meme, and maybe more) now buff allies as well as damaging enemies
  • Sacred heal ability added on the Priest Sceptre item, creates waves of healing projectiles around the healer.
  • Water Temple area added to the overworld
  • Continued work on improving session handling (linkdeath, etc)
  • Adjusted XP gain, takes a little longer to level up than it used to.


The image above is a map of the current game world, which is procedurally generated but also contains specific relationships between proc-genned areas.
-m

(1 edit)

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!
Dell R630
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.
Average Tetris
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.

The Bardo - Alpha 2 WiP

Some placeholder art in place, not much.

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