Short, Medium, and Long Term Goals

Here's a list of the short (next four months), medium (next year), and long-term goals (next couple of years after that) I have for coding, scripting, and other nonsense on the MUD.

-- Decided to expand this to include other aims and goals for everything else on the MUD

SHORT TERM - ESCAPE BETA
BUILDING:
1. Complete Dorthonion utterly and completely, making enough interesting things going on in it to keep adventurers coming back to the area for years. Includes developing all the various resource-sites and settlements to be found.

2. Develop a good set of objects, for Marachian, Haladin, Beorian, Noldo, Sinda, dwarves and orcs, including weapons, armour, leathergoods, foodstuffs, clothing, jewellery, and more.

3. Comprehensive flora and fauna object sets, for hunting, cooking, killing, cleaning, foraging, identifying, and brewing.

4. Scripts for wildlife management, random orc threats, scenery and immersion.

CODE:
For these items, I know exactly what needs to be done, and just need to find the time to do it.

1. Fix up any glaring bugs that inhibit play, remove any traces of the stock RPI engine, and institute more First Age atmospherics such as the calender, feast-days, coinage, and so on.

2. Continue improving one-on-one and small-scale combat, including adding advanced maneuvers for the styles and receiving input from players as to what's overpowered, what's underpowered, what's hot and what's not.

3. Overhaul groups stage 1, allowing for decent formations, overall group morale, and smart NPCs that make decisions to attack or flee based upon their group size and strength vs. enemy group size and strength.

4. Completely flesh out the professions - introduce either crafts, scripting or code to let every choice of every profession do something a little different, and let you play the game, also expanding on areas lacking. So, cookery, healing, foraging, herbalism, barter, hideworking, various combat skills, stealing will all get looked at and improved so each profession has something to do codedly on its own.

5. Bigger and better mobile AI - mobiles who pick weapons for your armour style, who stalk you through the forest and prey on you when you're weak, flee back to their homes when wounded, and another dozen or so ideas.

6. Skill overhaul. Fix up the way skills are learned and taught so most people can learn a skill from nothing, and eventually (with a lot of time and energy) increase it in to a viable skill.

-- If I have time... 7. Talents. Extra abilities you can choose at chargen (existing characters will be grand-fathered in) or spend reward points to purchase.

DOCUMENTATION:
1. Website documentation up, including meta-documentation, policies, credits, thank yous, copyright information, and so on.

2. Helpfiles of commands.

3. Basic outlines of First Age history, each of the cultures, and other general knowledge to allow a more uniform introduction to the lore of the game.

MEDIUM TERM - DEPTH AND INTERACTION

For most of these items, I have the systems planned on a scrapbook somewhere, but need to sit down and look and the code before I understand how to implement them.

0. Talents, if I haven't already got them.

1. Weather effects. Objects get dirty, muddy, wet, rusty and frozen. People outside get cold, and eventually die of exposure. Frost, howling winds, desperately hungry peasants, snow-filled passages, and dozens of more effects to really make you feel the terrible nature of Beleriand. Also the code required to overcome and survive these things.

2. Object damage. Simply enough. I've got a model worked out in my mind, and will implement it when it's ready. Will tie in with weather effects, so you can make sure your wet sword doesn't become rusty, but if it does, you've got the ability to clean and repair it a little bit.

3. Five more professions, taking the total to ten. Likely will include the crafters and merchants at this point, but also all the code these people might need to survive and flourish.

4. Clan management - the function to see how many NPCs and PCs are in your clan, and be required to find housing for them, food, pay them, and with the ability to train them, assign them on patrols, augment their behaviour, and more.

5. Group battles - formations, mass-battles, group morale, and a dozen or so more functions to slot in with 4.

6. Magic in all its forms and glory, or at least enough so some players can finally put their aura high and hope for the best.

7. Auto-invasion NPCs - groups of NPCs spread out from Angband, take land, grow in power, release patrols across the wilderness, raid player settlements and lands, and eventually become major power bastions that PCs need to overthrow.

LONG TERM - EVOLUTION

These things are -very- far off, and thus not at all well thought out, or how I want to do them.

1. 3-dimensional room movement, either on a grid or via something else.

2. Dynamic structure building for players - taking land, built a fort, and have it sieged by a dynamically generated horde of orcs. Or, lurk in to the forest, cut down some trees, make their own cabin and live happily ever after.

3. Do something with the client.

4. Think of some more long-term goals.