User blog:Winterwolf7/Why I Restarted Redemption in December 2014 (Part 2)

If you read my previous blog entry, you`ll understand how I came to be the owner and implementor of Redemption MUD and how I came to the eventual decision to close down.

So why did I decide to reverse my decision and come back? I'm still asking myself that question and putting the pieces together, some of which I'll try and express here on the blog.

What's changed?

My job is still roughly the same. I would say I have achieved nearly my ideal career goal in the last ten years. I knew from a young age that I wanted to design games. Now I work as a Systems Analyst and I design software for the Canadian Forces... which is as close to a game as you can get, perhaps even better.

My personal life is stable again. Four years after the end of my marriage, I am living with a new partner. We are very happy and have three kids between us. We are both divorced and our custody schedules are such that there is time in our lives for a good balance of relationship, work, leisure and family.

Financially I am doing better than I have in years and can afford the hobbies that I choose to enjoy.

Game wise, I have had some amazing achievements in Final Fantasy 11 Online. Finishing a mythic weapon that took me nine years to complete really took a lot of pressure out of playing. I still enjoy the game but there's no current driving force to play it every day with my major achievement completed.

One day while riding to work I started thinking about Redemption again. I missed the sense of community, I missed designing systems for games. I always had ideas for more things, such as mechanists, a much more detailed crafting system, ways to integrate a MUD onto the web. I debated working on them on my own but I didn't even know where to start. Although there had been no posts in more than 2 years, I posted a greeting on the Redemption MUD facebook group just because I was thinking about them.

And what do you know. There were a LOT of replies. A lot more than I ever expected. The community I missed was still out there for the most part. Some people didn't hesitate to ask directly if I was bringing the game back. I thought about it, but it didn't seem possible. I didn't even have any back ups to restore from. I searched on my home and work computers and found very little. I had a 5 year old dump of the code but no areas, help files or player files. On a whim I checked if Avacar's e-mail address still worked. It took him a few days to get back to me, but amazingly he had EVERYTHING. He sent it to me and I spend a couple of days looking it over and considering if I really had what it took to do it.

Surprisingly quickly, I found a very affordable service provider. Although I had never been a Linux administrator, the provider was super easy to work with and within 24 hours I had a working server. I steeled myself for dozens of hours of code upgrades to modernize the code so it would compile on a modern operating system. Turns out aside from warnings, I was able to launch it within a couple of hours. When I first logged in, everything started to come back to me. All the commands, tricks, even directions to areas. It was all still there from my memory. Even navigating the MUD source code was like I'd never left. I have occasionally been accused of having an eidetic memory; maybe it was true.

I can't promise that my motivation will last forever, but it is here for now, and I am making the time and finding the energy to create again. As always, without a community, there is no game, and I want and need the help of players and other immortals to make this work. In a lot of ways the age of MUDs is long gone. But things like cell phones bring new life to the medium. And even after all these years, there are plenty of things in MUDs that are designed just as good and sometimes even better than graphic MMORPGs.

So let's see where this is all going.