Building & Marketing

References and tools for designing, building, and marketing your text-based game.

Tools and references

The Art of Building - Older resource on building rooms and areas
The Builder Academy - Learn how to build your own world with tbaMUD
Bartle’s taxonomy of player types - Balance your game and playerbase
Grim Wheel’s Buildcraft section - Repository of articles and advice on MUD building
MUD Colorizer Tool - Easily add color to text strings; supports {x, @x, $x, and other code styles

An Introduction to MUD (1985) by Duncan Howard - PDF hosted on Museum of Computer Adventure Game History
Bartle’s MUD Writings Archive - Collection of academic and popular articles
Downloadable ftp.game.org Archive - Collection of MUD files and software submitted by internet users in the late 1980s
Imaginary Realities Archive - Tharsis Gate [HTTP only] - Thought leadership about MUDs, published between 1998-2001
Grim Wheel’s Imaginary Realities Archive - Additional resources and context about Imaginary Realities e-magazine
MUD Institute - Academically inclined repository of preserved codebases and curated articles
MUD Game Programming (2003) by Ron Penton - chm file available on Anna’s Archive
The Sourcery - Older collection of MUD developer articles

MUDs.Fandom.com - A vast collection of game listings, articles, and resources
StockMUD+ at stockmud.com/plus.html [HTTP only] - Read about it in Hades_Kane’s interview
Orcs.biz [HTTP only] - Collection of text-based game and resource archives from the co-founders of muds.wikia.com (now muds.fandom.com)
Titans of Text - Podcast interviewing creators and legends from the text-based game community, including Richard Bartle