A modern, web based, procedurally generated MUD.
The game is playable at https://agonyengine.com so head on over there to say hello, and take it for a spin.
A working copy of the game has been deployed and publicly accessible from day one. It is kept continuously up to date through automatic deployments on every merged pull request, so you can always check it out and see the progress.
Currently the game is not "playable". You can walk around the map and interact with other players, but there isn't a whole lot to do yet. Please check the open issues to see what kinds of things are in development right now.
Please see the Local Development article in the Wiki to learn how to run The Agony Engine on your local machine and get your development environment started.
The following goals will be updated periodically as the project progresses and more people get involved. They should be interpreted as "guiding principles" for how new features are considered and designed, and what the project road map looks like.
The Agony Engine uses the Spring Boot framework. It talks to the client over WebSockets which allows for real time messages between the MUD and your browser, as well as out-of-band channels to support features such as status bars and gauges.
Text based games have been around for several decades, but most of the MUDs out there today still use telnet as a protocol. On a technical level that is troubling because traffic (i.e. passwords) sent between players and the server is not encrypted, but on a more practical level it's just a very old protocol and there are simply better ways to do it now. The Agony Engine uses HTTPS for secure transport and BCrypt to ensure passwords are safe in the database.
The Agony Engine aims to create a play experience that feels like a "traditional" MUD codebase. It should feel familiar to anyone who has played a DikuMUD derivative MUD before.
While the play experience feels "traditional" the underlying game mechanics and systems should push beyond what is normal for a MUD, and even what is normal for modern games. Text based games offer a low cost platform for experimenting with game design without having to invest in art or sound, and The Agony Engine should take full advantage of that opportunity to offer players an experience that other multi-player games cannot.
Contributions and feature requests are welcome. The hope is that some will want to contribute to The Agony Engine because they like this game, while others will contribute because they've used it as a starting point for their own games. That's why it is MIT licensed, truly free open source code. Grab a copy, try it out, and see what you can do with it.
Please see the contributing doc to learn how to make contributions to The Agony Engine. If you have questions, suggestions or bugs feel free to open a GitHub issue to discuss them!