This is the first dev log for the upcoming Untold Dawn version 0.2 expansion, "Your Story." The "Your Story" expansion will be capped by the release of our limited pre-alpha testing on October 5, 2024.

You can read more about the 0.2 "Your Story" Expansion in the following post in our forums:

Untold Dawn 0.2 Expansion: Your Story

Introducing “Your Story” - the first major expansion for Untold Dawn. Immerse yourself deeper into the world of Untold Dawn with a suite of roleplay-enhancing features designed to enrich your character’s narrative. This expansion provides you with the tools to stay in character, express complex emotions, and craft detailed backstories, allowing for a more authentic and engaging roleplaying experience. As a Roleplay-Intensive game, the tools that you have to represent your character are importan…

Untold Dawnrune

Why "Your Story"?

For this whole year, we have been focusing on providing Untold Dawn with various coded features that make it a novel and sturdy basis for a roleplay intensive game. While Untold Dawn hardly matches the features of more established RPI games, a point which we will continue to stress until our pre-alpha launch to manage expectations, we believe that we've laid the stones for a game that can bring strong innovations the RPI MUD genre in the future with the help of our community.

However, Untold Dawn is primarily about playing out the role of a character. We wanted to focus the last few weeks of development of Untold Dawn in providing a sturdy basis for roleplay.

In the next few weeks, we will explore what features this expansion entails. This will not only include coded features, but also rules and other blog posts.

Game-Master Tools

Part of bringing your storyline to fruition is letting Game-Masters run plots that can involve your character. One important command for this, used traditionally in other RPI MUDs, is the echo command.

Staff members are now able to send echoes to a single target.

However, this can also be used to send echoes to everyone in the room.

The echo command is, no doubt, going to be a great tool in major RPTs in Untold Dawn.

Notes

Another important thing for roleplay is being able to take notes about your character and for the Game-Masters to be able to take notes on your character and other various things.

With that in mind, we have made a complex notes system. Staff can target an arbitrary number of object ids as part of the topic of a note:

This system is flexible and allows staffers to quickly figure out what has happened with an NPC or character recently:

However, this system is not just one-way. We have also implemented a biography system that lets you take notes on your character.

These biographies also show up for staff members who are handling an animation, letting them be in touch with the latest happenings of your character.

Both notes and biographies let you write multiple lines if your MUD client allows it (for example, Mudlet allows it). In the future, if there is a demand for it, we might create an in-game text editor for these and other functionality.

Here are the helpfiles for both commands as of 29/08/24 (bound to change):

Following the Story

It's important that, if you haven't played or if things happened while you weren't logged in, that you have a way to catch up.

As such, and part of the notes system above, staff members can make available story updates.

When a character logs in, you will get a notification if you have any unread story events.

By typing the 'story' command, you will catch up with any and all of the events that you might have missed. You can type 'story' at any time.

Tools For Immersion

We wanted players to have tools to immerse themselves and have liberty in how they portray their characters.

Every person has thoughts and in Untold Dawn, you can portray these thoughts with the think command. It uses the pre and post emote style that Diku users will feel comfortable with:

In some games, thoughts in their entirety pipe to staff. In Untold Dawn, a staffer needs to be monitoring the room or you to actually get these thoughts:

Another thing that you can do to keep yourself in character is to portray your character's feelings through the feel command.

As with the think command, this is only visible by yourself and staff monitoring the scene.

We do not intend to police what people think about for now; this is a tool for yourself to stay in character. Maybe in the future we implement some way for other players to access this, but for now we're happy to have this implementation!

Breaking Character & OOC Comms

While talking to other people is not forbidden in Untold Dawn, and OOC comms or even applying to characters alongside your buddies is more than fine, we try to keep the Untold Dawn experience itself very in character.

There will be no global channels; most of the support will be done through our Discord.

The intention is to keep everything that appears on your screen be relevant to your character.

However, it is important to let people communicate in local OOC to share various manners of things. We do not want this command to be abused, in an ideal sense, to turn scenes into OOC chatter; however, it is there for people to use:

What's Next?

We're going to present more previews for this feature, as well as other blog posts and forum posts related to other topics. Stay tuned as we approach the countdown to our pre-alpha release!