Hi there, been a while, but it is time again for an episode of ramblings. This is a special one, which will fundamentally shake the foundations of CoRE. Well, let's stop being overly dramatic and give you guys some more information.
When I started making CoRE the idea was to make a purely text-based game that can be played in Discord or any other chat app. Unfortunately, I had to learn over the past year the hard way, that while you save effort by making a game text-based, a lot of effort goes into User Interface design. As I tried to put all the relevant information in simple responses to commands, it quickly became more and more difficult to put all the necessary information "on the screen".
The main source of this problem is not that CoRE is text-based, but the nature of Discord and it being basically a wall of text where any information that should be retained must be either repeated again and again and again or be kept in the only memory bank available, the player. To be fair this is not exclusively a Discord problem but applies to all chat-based communication. This is unfortunately nothing that can be resolved and it severely limits how attractive it is to play a game as a series of chat messages.
A short example to make the problem less abstract, the !status command. You would call it to see how much hp and energy (among other things) you have. Now if you explore, get into some combat and resolve it, the game has to tell you what has changed, again and again and again. The same applies to inventory, item durability, currency, etc. This quickly adds up to either a huge spam of information or the reliance on players remembering or querying the information again and again. All of this is not exactly contributing to the fun factor.
That is why after long contemplation decided to leave the realm of chat-based gaming behind and turn CoRE into a web game instead. This will allow for status screens (player, character, inventory), simplify the market interactions and of course allow to pretty up the game with graphics and such. The good news is, that the switch is not too difficult as I always prepared to support other text-based media. That said, I don't want to just convert the UI commands to web, I will also use the opportunity a GUI offers to improve some of the UI design to better use all the features the game already has.
It will be a couple weeks to do the switch and there will be always room for improvement, but I believe it is for the better, as I can clearly see the issues the chat-based gameplay causes and they would only be made worse in the future.
So stay tuned for web-based CoRE.
BR,
thatclaimgamedev