Hello readers!

I've been away for a while from the devblog since I was sick for a week and the European Football Championships have been taking my time more than BatMUD has. Spain won and now I'm back to business. I don't have a very good topic now, but let's see how this goes and hopefully it will turn out to be a bit more interesting.

If you've been reading my devblog before, you probably know already that I've been coding the new version of the evil priests guild or that this project has been active for a few years now - sometimes more actively and sometimes more passively. The two years took some planning and ideas before I came up with the concepts I was satisfied with. It doesn't mean it was all I did and sometimes there were few months when there was no progress at all. For example I coded the Kharim's Vault (Yes, it's in Kharim guild. All the hints you're gonna get!) in the meantime.

In projects like this there are usually many things you need to take care of. I personally need to have plans or otherwise I'll forget half the things I was supposed to do. In fact, there have been some days when I need to stop for a day to just think what kind of stuff I actually have and to what direction I needed to code this project now. The guild projects require that there's a thematic concept, the skills and the spells, the other guild related systems (reputation systems if you so wish to call them), some thinking how they'd work with other guilds and of course the technical implementation and the testing. Sometimes I even code some features that were not originally in my plans if they just seem like they would fit in.

Just to give some perspective, I have eight quite large files of documentation of this project and I have set up a Wikipedia on my own domain for lore issues about this guild. This is something that I have never done before, but I hope that this guild will be better than the last one I came up with. After having said that I know a few highbies already dropped their eyeballs on the table because they are fearing it's going to be too powerful because "wizzes want their own creations to be the best ones". At this point I have no clue how this guild is going to be balanced, but I want to say something that I've said before: I've experienced that usually having the best players in the guild result into lots of different requests and manage to find more bugs than a casual player. That being said, I would so much more prefer to have some mellow, carefree roleplayers on the channel instead.

So what makes these big projects so difficult to complete? Their vastness of course, but sometimes you need to take a lot of things into account. When you introduce a guild which has new kinds of technical features (and you should have those, otherwise why would you make a guild if there's nothing new to offer?), you need to think what is the correct way to use them and how you're expecting players to take advantage of them. That's the easy part. Sometimes it takes 10 minutes to code some feature that is useful to player. Then it takes the following three days to block all kind of loopholes and abuses that someone might think of. That can be very frustrating as you need to cover your bases, but that kind of coding is boring and not at all creative. And even after that, there are multiple cases where something bugs that you haven't even thought of. Annoying

I have also been careful not to announce any deadlines, because I know what kind of history BatMUD has about ETAs and it's not easy to give a good estimation. I can say that I'm trying to complete this project during this year, BUT this isn't an absolute deadline and I have no idea if I can even make it. But I'll try to put real effort into it so let's keep our fingers crossed!