The Anvil

Iron Realms Entertainment is considering making some substantial enhancements to the Nexus and Flash clients over the next few months. I am looking for a little feedback on an idea we are currently batting around.

As stated in previous posts, our game interface has remained relatively unchanged for years. With the exception of powerful clients that allow users to create triggers, aliases, and other settings, it can almost be argued our games have not seen any major interface innovation in over 10 years. The game can only be viewed and played as scrolling text. Continue reading

Happy Questors!

When Lusternia was in the planning stages, quests were a top priority. Not just any quest, but complex and developed quests. Coming from Achaea as the lead builder, I had developed definite ideas on how quests should work and can modestly say that I’m one of the top quest designers around (okay, maybe not so modest). In any event, I thought I’d share my l33t quest skills with others in a series of blog posts.

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Iron Realms is not a huge company, but we make huge games with massive amounts of content for our players to explore and interact with. Where does all of this content come from? How is it created, how is it stored, and how is it presented for consumption by the players? It’s a lot more complex than a few source files and a dumb telnet socket passing information down the pipe.

Rapture is the beast that does most of the heavy lifting for all of our games. Rapture is (amongst other things), an engine that runs on all of our game’s servers. It handles all of the network code, letting players connect and send and receive information. It provides a programming language that the coders on each game use when modifying features of that specific game. Rapture itself (the engine, compiler, and assorted tools) is written in C++, encompassing many thousands of lines of code divided across hundreds of source files. It is an impressive, flexible, complex system that makes everything in IRE possible. Continue reading

I recently interviewed Nick Gammon of MUSHClient as part of an ongoing series of interviews for our blog. Nick is the creator of MUSHClient, a popular program for playing MUD games and is packed with tons of features that allow you to enhance your gaming experience with Iron Realms Entertainment.

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

Nick: When I was somewhat younger (ie. about 30 years ago) I was working as a programmer for a company in Melbourne (Australia). Around that time the Original Adventure by Crowther and Woods came out (just called Adventure then, of course). At lunch time my fellow programmers and I would fire up Adventure on our terminals and play together. It wasn’t technically a multi-player game, but with us all sitting side-by-side we did our game chat “in real life”. Like, “hey, you get past the bear by feeding it!”. Continue reading

We are getting closer to releasing our IRE Toolbar. The first release will work with the Firefox browser. If people like it (and use it) we will develop a Chrome and IE version as well.

At the time of this post, the only thing the toolbar does is display a list of online players. While that is cool, it is not very useful. What we need is a solid application that you (the users) will find useful.

Here are some features we are looking at. Let us know what you think and what you would like to see included. What would you find useful? What would get you to install it?

• Online player list.
• Clicking a character name will bring you to the IRE site displaying basic character data.
• Notification of unread messages.
• Notification when a new message arrives.
• The ability to read/browse your messages.
• The ability to send a message.
• Notification when a mutual ally logs in.
• A button to hit the site and login to your character. (flash or nexus)
• Notifications when a new news item is posted
• Links to news items (would take you to the website to read them)
• Display a stream of in-game events (We call a gamefeed). For example, it will say with a player is killed, gets a new level, wins an arena event, etc.
• A vote button! Woo!

We can literally do almost anything with the toolbar.

So my question is this:

What would you want to see on a toolbar that would make it a must have for yourself?

Please post your thoughts and ideas  in the comments section below.

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!