Hello, I'm building a roadmap for development and thought it might make sense to ask what the lowest hanging fruit are for people.

What are you waiting on the most?

I'll make a list and weight my priorities accordingly.

For me, it's something like:

• Modernise and containerise codebase (95% done)
• Long standing bugfix pa**
• ...
• Item extended attributes
• Guild level progression system
• Resource nodes (done, never used...)
• Holopets
• Skill system overhaul
• ...
• And the elephant in the room, new maps, items, quests, etc.

Probably will be a parallel track of game features and game content as they are both important.

We should probably have a "quick wins" track where quick fixes/improvements are triaged and fast-tracked.

But let me know your current gripes.

You mentioned not wanting to vibe code; curious why. To avoid bugs? 

I think those still here are those who've been around for ages and ages and who would opt for speed of delivery over perfect code. I, for one, would be ok seeing and reporting the occasional bug if it means getting new features and game progression fairly frequently. 

Regarding the list of priorities, I think we need to accept the new reality that there are a lot less active players than there used to be. Raids/equipment farming are less feasible. So new and existing bosses either need to be nerfed OR item attributes, holopets and a new skill system make up the gap.

I don't know what "resource nodes" are

Guild progression system is only relevant if there is something to work towards (better gear, better upgrades, etc.); otherwise it'll just be a vanity metric.

New bosses, maps, items, quests, etc. is what will get players to play and stay. 

I'm curious, now that you've made an MCP, have you tried asking Claude (or whatever AI you use) what it recommends you build to make the game fresh, engaging, and improve retention? It can probably help give you some unique game ideas and help with prioritization too.

I was mostly just highlighting that this is a mature codebase so when you get a**istance from an LLM, the pattern is already established and it has to play in your sandpit, rather than opening an empty folder and telling it you want a website, and it goes off and makes all the decisions.


Agreed, I'm definitely in move fast and break things mode, but the breakages should be less than we used to get anyway, because everything is so much better structured.


Yeah, things should scale sensibly; for one, you should be able to play most things solo, so we should factor that in. I'm fairly confident that activity will pick up if my own activity picks up though. It's just something we'll have to bear in mind for now. There aren't many of these games left, but some of them have quite substantial user bases still, so I think we have a chance of picking some of them up.


Yeah, lots of focus on your own character + smaller raiding party content sounds good to me.


It's a feature that allows us to put "resources" on a map. We already have fishing, mining, possibly botany (picking flowers & herbs). The reason I never enabled it is, we need the raw materials to be useful, so I need to get some crafting features added. Plus, I need to get a proper inventory of official base game items fleshed out and wire up their recipes.

I think it'll be much, much easier with AI. I also held off because I thought extended item attribs would make sense to land first, but maybe that's not actually true.


I need to find my old notes, but I vaguely recall that the level progression would unlock things on maps. I thought we could even have guild-based quests, guild skill system with some level-based unlock, etc.


The one recurring theme through the entire life of this game so far is that it needs more content, and I never ever get around to doing it justice, because it's agonisingly boring to do, and my skills lie in feature development rather than creativity.
But, the AI thing has done wonders for me and I honestly think we can push the content situation forward very rapidly, especially when I get this MCP working (I need to amend tilesets to have metadata about what's in each tile, so it can "visualise" what it's making for me).


Actually, no, it didn't occur to me for some reason. I will do so. lol