[Divunal-author]author efficiency (my two cents)

[Phil Christensen]

On one hand, I certainly agree with what Michael has said. Primarily,
the documentation that is available at this point is pretty sparse.
However, we do have to recognize that divunal is not yet a commercial
enterprise, and having to juggle other jobs makes finding time to work
on divunal pretty hard. In that same vein I have to applaud those,
namely, Glyph, who are willing to pull all-nighters in order to
coordinate day jobs with game development.

Also, we do need some sort of plan about where exactly divunal is
going, and what the ultimate goal of the game is (if that's possible,
if not, as close as we can come).

I also concur that one of the number one things we need along with
better documentation is a real TODO list. Something heavy-duty
(allowing people to "sign up" for jobs, mark tasks as completed) and
web-based is required. I'd like to volunteer to work on a cgi script
for such a list.

As far as Michael's point about rather having one good writer than two
programmers, I have to disagree. Since the key to divunal is supposed
to be the puzzles, what is necessary is programmers who are also good
writers, a rare breed. Few interesting puzzles can be created at this
time without some sort of coding.

Finally, as far as the current state of the game, i'm afraid that at
this current rate of speed, it's going to be awhile before we have
something that's comparable to the other MUDs/games/whatever that are
currently available. For example, take a look at Avalon
(www.avalon-rpg.com). True, it's direction is a bit different than
ours, but it is really mind-blowing. That's something I would pay for
(if i were into paying for things, which i'm not ;-))....

Still, I have to close this with one thought. Twisted Reality is cool.
I've been trying to write a game framework like this for years, and
some of the features we may take for granted code-wise I never even
thought of when I was developing. Divunal can be incredible...we just
need to work at it.

-phil
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