This week I've been coding some evil priest related things when I've had the opportunity to find time for that. At the moment I'm working with a concept of underground swamp where you can appoint toads to rule it. These toads can have different kind of characteristics which makes them somewhat different to work with. I mean eventually as at the moment I haven't coded them yet. Each of the toads have some kind of good trait but also a bad trait. For some reason I got this bizarre idea to document the function which chooses them using the melody of introduction song of the old sitcom Facts of Life. So if you're asking what's taking me for so long with these evil priests, it might be a subtle hint. Here's is the link to intro song and below is my function documentation:

Alright, that was just meant just to amuse you, although it was all true. Now we can proceed to topic I was going to write about which is meeting the expectations. Now I'm not talking about approval standards or quality standards set for any area. I have named this dilemma as the "king problem". Let's pretend that there are two developers who are both planning an area and both want to invest about average amount of time into its implementation. The first guy is making an area which is a small inn where there's a problem that one of the guests has been breaking into other guests' rooms and the player needs to find the thief. The second guy is making an area which involves the King of Dwarves ordering his troops to prepare for war against orcs and your task is to assist them somehow.

Let's ponder these two ideas now. The first idea requires a mediocre amount of rooms, some descriptions for the hotel and some guests as NPCs and perhaps the people who are running the inn. It's a small idea, it's not too glamorous, but in fact many compact ideas which are well implemented carry very far. The second idea brings a lot of problems which makes it difficult to come up with a plausible implementation. When you make the king, you also need to build settings so that it is worthy of a king as most kings don't live in a small hut by the countryside. You might need to make a castle. To make a believable castle, you can't settle for 10 rooms or it doesn't look that big. When thinking about the quest, you need to think why an average Joe would even get an audience with the king. Why is the king giving the task to you, when he is the ruler of perhaps ten of thousands of people? Also if the king would be killed, it would be sort of downer when thinking the overall picture from lore perspective. Also, if everybody chooses to make places with kings or queens, soon you cannot throw a rock without hitting a king which is a thematic problem since usually everybody isn't a king. You probably already see my point, right? The creations of grandeur come with higher expectations and such projects are more difficult to implement plausibly.

The same thing goes with demons and other creatures of supernatural origin. Of course the world of BatMUD is far more supernatural than this regular world where the most exotic thing you can see is the Turkish guys who are running a pizza place across the street. We have undeads, demons, and magic is an everyday occurrence. But even so we should try to use some standards for them. If we're making an area which has demons, undeads or mighty dragons, it would make sense that you wouldn't really stumble into them by accident and that they would be located in remote places which already allude that you need to arm yourself because there's an evil hand afoot ahead.