The Anvil

In Imperian lately, we’ve been working hard to make sure that players have a reason to log in and have fun. Along with the rest of the IRE games, we’ve been offering lessons, credits, and vials during the past few months to encourage people to log in every day.

One new thing that we’ve been trying in Imperian is the creation of various “theme days”, where we basically hold a series of events that revolve around one theme. The first we held several months ago was a whimsical Frog Day, with games, events, and prizes that revolved around giant frogs.

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As most have noticed, Iron Realms has begun to use new formats to enhance your experience with our games. For example, we are using UStream.tv to let you meet and chat live with our producers, Facebook and Twitter to communicate with players, and we have improved our newsletter to deliver concise information. Not to mention we also started this wicked cool blog! Continue reading

Introduction

As you play any of the many games from Iron Realms Entertainment, you may notice that our in-game combat is incredibly complex and in-depth, featuring numerous afflictions that must be cured. Lusternia alone features over two hundred separate afflictions! Naturally when Achaea, the first Iron Realms game, came into existance, the number of afflictions was much lower and it was more than possible to “manual” – curing reliably without the aid of an external, automated system. I’m going to illustrate how curing systems used by players today act to automatically handle afflictions, curing them without any real-time input from the player needed. Continue reading

I was recently able to catch Mike Potter (Zugg) of Zuggsoft Software, the creator of zMUD and CMUD and tie him down long enough to answer a few questions for our players about his history with MUDs, his MUD clients, and his future plans for his products.

So without further ado!

Me: Would you relate your first experience or introduction to MUDs?

Mike: In the summer of 1995 I was depressed from the divorce from my first wife.  I discovered MUDs to escape from the “real world” and was hooked!  I didn’t like any of the PC MUD clients available at that time, so I started writing my own.  My clan-mates on Dark Castle started using it and told me that I should make it Shareware and sell it to other MUD players.  A year later I formed Zugg Software and started selling zMUD .  Zugg was my old pen/paper D&D character name, and the name I was using on the Dark Castle MUD.  I no longer play any MUD using the name of “Zugg”, so if you see somebody using that name, they are an imposter.  In 1997, the income from zMUD was enough that I was able to quit my day job and work on zMUD fulltime.  Today, almost 15 years later, Zugg Software is the last remaining full-time business selling and supporting MUD client software. Continue reading

On February the 13th at Midnight, GMT time, Tears of Polaris opened its doors to allow anyone to come in and take a look at the newly redesigned novice introductions and explore a tiny bit of the world as well as take a look at some of the archetypes in the game.  Over 300 people decided to take a look in the twenty-four hour period; from the blazingly fast Whitney to the multiple run through people like Saran and Kirraxus, just to name a few, and we learned a lot, fixed a lot, and are reinvigorated a lot from all the responses, comments, and suggestions we received!

I recently had a chance to ask the lead developers of Mudlet, Heiko Kohen and Vadim Peretokin, a few questions about their product and future plans.

The supplied some great insights into what we can expect, and if you are an avid player of any IRE game, I am sure you will find the interview very enlightening.

Read on!

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As a continuation of my previous post, we have begun to implement MXP (Mud Extension Protocol) across the IRE games. MXP allows us to do several things, including placing HTML-like links right into the game text. For example, when the game asks you to GREET MATHYUS, we can link that command and allow the player to click on the text in order to progress.

Imperian, has integrated MXP throughout its introductory tour. Players can use MXP links to advance through the entire tour. As the tour begins to wind down, players slowly have to begin entering commands via the keyboard more often. Continue reading

A Hungry Newbie

One of the challenges for a MUD is to convert those who show a passing interest into a true player. Let’s face it, there are no fancy graphics and little wow factor involved in staring at a screen of text. Even after jumping the (pretty darn high) hurdle that this is a text game, these games are complex. New players have to learn commands to navigate, chat on different channels, kick a rat, buy items, check the weather, etc. Putting aside the mountains of basic commands one needs to know, there can also be an overwhelming number of things to do since there are no linear paths in playing a MUD.

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Five years after the last new class (Bard) was introduced to Achaea, we wanted to create some exciting new content for our players. We felt that combat balance was at a state where we could take a step back from our in-depth classlead evaluation and focus on a new class. The idea for Blademaster had been tossed around in the Garden of the Gods for a few years, but serious planning and development really began in August 2009.

We knew swords were going to be the basis of our new class before we began design. The main skill, Two Arts, is heavily referenced in Achaea’s history and was an obvious choice for a foundation. Our biggest question was how to make Blademaster live up to its legendary reputation without being overpowered. The design went through several iterations, with early designs resembling a reskinning of current classes. In the end we tried to make Blademaster as unique as possible without overcomplicating things – we didn’t want to be forced to create a new combat system just for this class. We are proud to say that, out of 54 total abilities across the new skills of Two Arts and Striking, only 5 are shared with other classes. The third skill, Shindo, is referenced in the games history (though not by name) as being very similar to the existing skill of Kaido. We decided to preserve this trait, splicing old favourites with 15 new abilities.

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Referrals, friends, and word of mouth have always been the biggest way IRE has thrived over the years. It is a good sign when people tell friends about a game, business, or product. As such, we are releasing several new ways to reward you for telling people about us over the next few months.

Today, we are starting with a basic referral program. IRE has created a way for you to link to our games. These links will flag any new characters finding our games, as a referral from you.

So what does this do for you?

Free credits of course! Continue reading