6 ms·

Teaching my kid to code with a modern MUD

269 points by andrewjanke 2mo ago

moffers 2mo ago
I loved MUDs as a kid, and really do miss the sense of immersion and depth that came from joining a long established server and just exploring.
- debo_ 2mo ago
  I had a blast in the late 2000s joining dead MUDs and just wandering around. It was utterly bizarre, in a good way. It also felt somewhat shocking when someone else actually signed in.
- Aurornis 2mo ago
  I have a love/hate relationship with my memories of the MUD era. I loved exploring different worlds and interacting with some of the brilliant people who took the time to help teach and encourage others. I was a casual who would disappear for months at a time when doing real world things, but it was comforting to be able to come back a little community of people building fun things. The couple MUD communities I participated in eventually collapsed under drama explosions from terminally online people. Some really manipulative and cruel stuff from people who would present themselves as noble community leaders, work themselves into positions of power, then grind down everyone in the out group until the rest of the community stopped playing. I would log in to a couple of them once a year. It was the same small ingroup of people idling away. All the recent posts on the in-game message board were from the new people complaining, admonishing, or introducing more rules to tighten their grip on anyone who remained. Really sad to see the same pattern collapse multiple different communities in the same way.
  - shevy-java 2mo ago
    It seems you only had exposure to a limited set of MUDs that died quickly. I played some MUDs that were quite solid; PaderMUD/Xyllomer in the late 1990s (peak count connection at about 60 different people in late 1998). GEAS (similar code base) was also quite ok-ish up to 2013, though admin made too many mistakes (Asralites, aka the warclergy, were pimp-nerfed via divine codex to disallow them from starting wars, the old 'who' was stolen by PO Allalltar and PO Okkita and many more mistakes). But community wise both had many great roleplayers and your description appears to be hugely one-sided in that you never found competent roleplayers that would narrate a storyline (or usually several, if you had enough players) at the same time. Often "drama" is just roleplay and reaction by characters to in-game situations. I am aware that some players sabotage(d) MUDs and cliques rose past 1998 or so; and many older players gave up due to lack of time and what not. So the genre struggled already past 1998 and maintaining MUDs was much harder. But things such as "grind down everyone" can only happen if the rules are broken and the code is broken really. I also highly doubt that players were the primary "until the rest of the community stopped playing" as a problem - perhaps it applies to the MUDs you frequented, but very clearly this was not the case for all MUDs, so I suspect you had a very limited set of exposure to MUDs. I mentioned two; you did not mention any MUD specifically. Can you mention which MUDs you played extensively for a while? As for pattern collapsing MUDs, I actually agree; in particular those who held the monopoly over the game code, can really quickly ruin a game. This does not even happen deliberately all of the time; old admin stopped playing their own MUDs and after +30 years they no longer understand why some code changes ruined the MUD. It's a tragedy without a good fix, because they are old and lack time to play, so they slowly stop understanding the game they still make code changes to.
    - Aurornis 2mo ago
      > It seems you only had exposure to a limited set of MUDs that died quickly Limited set, yes. I was never a hardcore player. I would drop in for some months, then disappear again for months as I had other things going on in my life. Quickly, no. Some of the MUDs are still running today (as I mentioned) but my in and out nature made the dramatic changes more obvious. I would spend the summer away doing something, and come back to discover someone new had worked their way into the admin staff and was stirring the pot at every opportunity. One time I came back and the MUD was taken offline because the staff was infighting so much about it. > But things such as "grind down everyone" can only happen if the rules are broken and the code is broken really. I also highly doubt that players were the primary "until the rest of the community stopped playing" as a problem I'm not pretending my experience was common to all MUDs because I didn't play a large number. However the ones I did play eventually succumbed to admin and staff drama. Your assumption is backwards: It wasn't the people breaking rules who were causing problems. It was the people who were making rules. Some of them came up with increasingly specific things that were decided to be against an ever longer list of rules, which became the weapon which they could wield against anyone they didn't like. Temporary bans and restrictions were handed out selectively to their political adversaries.
      - Modified3019 2mo ago
        Yeah what you’ve described a basically how I saw many forums collapse over the years as well. While they all have the basic problems of bringing in and retaining users, many stacked on top of those issues an unremovable set of hostile admins/mods driving away people from the kingdom they usurped. The people who have the most time and energy to give for moderation, are the same ones most in love with the control for it’s own sake.
        Aurornis 2mo ago
        It's a pattern I see in a lot of communities now. Some of the open source projects I follow have had their communities collapse the same way: Some group comes in with all smiles and energy to help out, then they brings their friends into the upper ranks because they say they need more help, then they start pushing agendas and adding rules to give themselves more power, then finally they just exhaust everyone else who isn't interested in fighting the battles every time they log on to do something. The few remaining forums I frequent have survived because they have no tolerance for admins who push their own agendas. They've all erred on the side of minimal rules and bans only in extreme cases. Every forum I've been on that went all-in on rules and heavy moderation has collapsed, or at least driven away the core users and left roaming packs of ingroup people who care more about picking apart everyone else than being part of the community. It's weird how many different places I've watched this happen online.
- ButlerianJihad 2mo ago
  It is very strange to me when people refer generically to "MUD" and cannot even seem to qualify what type of MUD they refer to. Since the advent of MUD gaming, there has been a wide variety of codebases, servers, and clients, with distinct genealogical lineages, that appeal to quite distinct sectors of nerd-dom, and sometimes with very little overlap in the player base. The original big-3 "non-Tiny" MUDs were: AberMUD, DikuMUD, and LPMud. These were largely unknown to me as I never played any of them, but they were mostly known as combat-based, player-programmable, and even quite distinctly European, for the most part. I could be wrong. TinyMUD Classic began at CMU with Jim Aspnes, but quicky a lot of forks developed that resulted in MUCK, MUSH, MOO, FuzzBall and other interesting derivatives. The Tiny* class shared a lot of playerbase, because the appeal was mostly the same; all were user-extensible but only some were programmable; none were combat-based or adversarial. They mostly tended to evolve into social and chat functions, once they were established and built-up. There are plenty of other MUD types and in the 90s, every budding programmer had ideas and forked a codebase for their own purposes. But it still baffles me, when commenters here and there wax nostalgic about those MUD days, I really have no idea what sort of game they're referring to, if they cannot be more specific.
  - vector_spaces 2mo ago
    I expect that people who mention MUDs largely do not expect anyone to know what they are talking about, since these games have nearly always been tiny and nowhere near even nerd pop culture. At least this has been my experience -- so I will prefer to say "I am playing this game called Hesperia/Achaea/Discworld/whatever, which is like a text-based RPG" and avoid even the "MUD" terminology. Further, I expect an even smaller subset of people who have played MUDs are aware of the 'distinct genealogical lineages' you describe. As someone who spent my teens browsing mudconnector and dabbling in lots of random MUDs listed there, I started hazily noticing patterns in structure, design, mechanics, and even networking to some extent, and suspecting that certain games existed within specific 'traditions' of MUD development or even used similar libraries or frameworks, but I didn't have the context or curiosity to dig deeper. Like everything, this can be modeled as a funnel: of the relatively small number of people on planet Earth who know that MUDs exist, only a tiny fraction has even connected to one, an even tinier fraction of those spent meaningful time on one, and an even smaller number of these who have thought to contextualize and taxonomize what they were played Anyway, I am curious what level of specificity would you find normal?
groffl 2mo ago
[flagged]
- clemailacct1 2mo ago
  Yikes, this is a bit too harsh.
- skinfaxi 2mo ago
  What? The article even states there's only one use of AI. What are you talking about? > Wish is the only AI feature in Canon, and it’s strictly limited to a single tutorial item per day. In a gameworld where everything else is explicitly written by humans for humans. And that alone was instantly polarizing.
  - philipwhiuk 2mo ago
    It's the only AI feature available to users in Canon but the entirety of Canon itself is also vibecoded.
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    - eddieroger 2mo ago
      So we can't enjoy driving a car unless we build it ourselves? Can't cook with knives we didn't forge? They made something together and used it to - by hand - create more, including the capability to extend what it created. From the kid's perspective, the coder not yet able, it's no different than if her dad created the language from scratch.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- ricardobeat 2mo ago
  It's a bit obvious that the game uses AI from the first screenshot.
zabzonk 2mo ago
I honestly think the child would be far better served with Scratch rather than some half-assed adventure writing language (having created several such languages myself). Edit: To clarify, the languages I created were also half-assed - it's very difficult to create a good one.
- hombre_fatal 2mo ago
  I think the only thing that matters is whatever the kid finds appealing enough to do at all. e.g. I started with Ruby on Rails. Not even Ruby. The feedback loop is what convinced me that I wanted to write software and then dive into the fundamentals.
- a022311 2mo ago
  I'd say Canon and Scratch are different tools with different purposes. Both are simple and interactive enough for children to love. The main difference I see is that Canon abstracts away a lot of the game state management logic and you get to focus on creating characters, items and having lots of fun. Scratch looks like it has a steeper learning curve and while it is a good introduction to programming, it gets pretty hard to navigate once project size increases. As someone who started programming with Scratch, I think that making a text adventure game like the ones Canon does in Scratch would be much more complicated and the end result wouldn't be half as nice.
- andrewstuart 2mo ago
  Scratch is so bad I think it must put kids off. It makes zero sense to start people off in an actually bad programming environment. Try Snap! Instead of Scratch.
  - myhf 2mo ago
    [dead]
- cmrdporcupine 2mo ago
  My kids got bored and annoyed by Scratch very quickly.
compacct27 2mo ago
A MUD got me into programming, just wanted to make one myself. I was too young then. Now that I’m “grown”, every five years I feel like the kids these days have so many tools to make it easier or at least more knowable. Also, that ASCII art(or pixel art?) as the header looks serene. Any tips/rabbit holes on achieving that art style?
- voidUpdate 2mo ago
  Looks like it's just dithered pixel art. The JS in the page isn't obfuscated, and I'm not an expert but it looks like the image is being dynamically generated, and then there's a bayer dithering with some extra random jitter
mentos 2mo ago
The Yoink used in the end was a word/action I first came across in Ultima Online when players would yoink steal an item from another players backpack. Curious if that’s coincidence or if players of UO brought that over most likely from MUDs.
- axus 2mo ago
  I don't know him, but Raph Koster (and Richard Garriot) definitely played a few MUDs.
- WorldMaker 2mo ago
  EverQuest and Ultima Online had a huge overlap with MUDs of their time. Both in terms of developer experience (parts of EverQuest allegedly came about by starting from a Diku MUD codebase; several UO designers such as Raph Koster had been MUD devs and/or "wizards"/admins) and also player experience (many of the earliest players and their vocabulary coming from MUDs of the day and/or playing both).
Bluescreenbuddy 2mo ago
Sounds like an ad disguised as an article.
- saidnooneever 2mo ago
  Guy made something and wrote a blog about it. What else is on here actually? Do you want to read more about AI benchmarks and Bitcoin???
- justusthane 2mo ago
  It's an in-depth post about something neat that someone made. Exactly what I want to read on here.
- Hugsbox 2mo ago
  Author doesn't appear to be selling it, just showing it off.
- chrysoprace 2mo ago
  Given Canon is invite-only and most of the article is breaking down the technical implementation, that seems highly unlikely.
saidnooneever 2mo ago
comment section is quite critical/harsh? for no good reason? I think this is an awesome project for them both. And it's totally understandable to use an LLM for the base project as it's a 'fun' thing from the read. it doesn't look like it's trying to compete with anything.... The kid can learn within an environment created by parent, so they can also collaborate on improving that environment, while the kid also has their own learning _within_ that environment. This seems like a wonderfully geeky adventure to go on if ur kid enjoys it :D love it. hope it will spark some cool interactions between them and make some epic memories :) Also, maybe people forget how it was like back in the day. I am not _too_ old - pentium 1 was my first PC. I learned making games in PASCAL, QBASIC and later custom C implementations that came with like 'gamemaker ' CDs etc. this was all very complicated to learn at a young age... Had to get many books and things (no internet!) at the PC shop to try and get my head around it. Never quite did until much later in my life! Sure things like Scratch exists, but this beauty of this one is that this one is _theirs_. Surely we can recognize the enjoyment that might bring to a parent and kids' lives? Learning is a bonus! Not everything is about being technically the best of the best -_- stop being Marines at everyhting. We're not at war with eachother over who writes the best code. Good use of LLM technology to make a project in my mind. props!
- 12ah6 2mo ago
  Top comment is quite naive. With that populist rhetoric you can defend anything.
  - d4mi3n 2mo ago
    Can we contribute to the dialog rather than bash someone’s thoughts on it? As a start, why do you disagree and how would you further this discussion?
    - andrewstuart 2mo ago
      Cause they are anti LLM and it seems such people need to not just have their stance but whack everyone with it.
jblakey 2mo ago
It's nice to see my old MUD is still online, and my account is still there, 30 years later!:) https://gatewaymud.org/ https://gatewaymud.org/
liveoneggs 2mo ago
I remember trying the various MUSH/MUCK/MOO variants and being out of my depth.
animanoir 2mo ago
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12345hn6789 2mo ago
A bit sad to see the author "10xing" his passion project with LLMs. I ended up moving one of my older projects in a similar way and I feel gross about it now. As if I didn't even work on it originally. I may just hard reset the LLM commits off my tree entirely at this point. Hopefully he doesn't come to regret it either.
- ashd123 2mo ago
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Benjamin_Dobell 2mo ago
This is extremely interesting to me. I also have an 8 year old daughter who inspired me to build tooling for kids to create their own games. However, what I've come up with is quite different than this. https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids The primary mechanism through which kids create their game worlds is taking photos of their own hand drawn artwork. I found traditional game dev tooling was far too technical and verbose for my daughter to stay interested. Honestly, it's not just a matter of her losing interest due to the complexity. Frankly, I don't want her sitting in front of a screen that long. She's a kid and I want her doing typical kid stuff. She and her younger sisters play sports, draw, paint, perform magic shows, and sing and dance around the house like complete nutbags — and I love it! So whilst what I've built is highly technical for me to maintain, I'm not trying to expose all that complexity to kids. At least, not yet. I'm mostly interested in fueling creativity and letting kids explore. That's not to say kids that want to dive deep can't — we offer visual coding experiences etc. The intent is kids gain access to new features through self directed exploration and play. If some kids stop at just play, that's OK. The primary game mechanics (drawing and building worlds) are still inherently creative. Although my approach is different, there is a heap in this article I resonant with. The hacking mentality, and letting kids go beyond the artificial constraints in particular. There's still much of Breaka Club that I can improve on. I'm running a limited in-school pilot at present and that's already yielded some really interesting insights. I'm really keen to continue to see what others put out in this space. I think it's drastically underserved and there's plenty of room for multiple approaches.
- sgt 2mo ago
  I've seen your concept, it's a really good idea!
- kerblang 2mo ago
  Using the kids' own artwork is a cool idea.
imadierich 2mo ago
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mickeyp 2mo ago
MUDs are such a wonderful way to introduce kids to "slow gaming", if one can call it that. I grew up with MUDs; they are a cherished memory of mine. There's a lot of fun "lego-style" creativity to be had in designing rooms, mobs and coming up with grand area designs. Cool idea.
- jason-johnson 2mo ago
  I find it strange to call it "slow gaming" but I guess it depends on what you're doing. If you're doing PVP, it feels like one of the fastest versions of that possible.
njoyablpnting 2mo ago
Have been teaching coding to kids professionally for a while now. Ultimately what works is what the kid will engage in. Some kids bounce off of Scratch completely but then get totally hooked on text programming. I've been following what little has been published around teaching coding with AI, I'd say it's inconclusive at best which also tracks with my experience. We don't totally ignore it, since it is a standard development tool now, but if the environment is not tightly constrained it can be detrimental, it can quickly spit out a bunch of code that makes the student very overwhelmed. You'd be surprised what kids can make once you give them the basic building blocks: https://jump.academy/projects/fruit-drop https://jump.academy/projects/fruit-drop Sometimes we will let them use AI to make a focused change to their project, like "make the character do a flip when he jumps", then they're getting a fairly controlled diff surrounded by a ton of context, which I think really does boost their coding "literacy". I'd rather my students be able to read code well than write a for loop from memory, so I've found it useful in that sense.
- abadar 2mo ago
  That was fun. Emma did a great job building Fruit Drop!
- vector_spaces 2mo ago
  The comments on this HN thread are all very confusing to me and making me wonder if I read a different article altogether. For instance, I am wondering what exactly you are responding to with this comment, since the game described in the article is not really about teaching the kid to code with AI at all? I mean, what you wrote is interesting, but it isn't really topical The blog post that I read mentions a single generative AI feature baked into the game that allows the player to create a single item once per day using a text prompt. But it is one single feature with limited uses. The blog post devotes very little ink towards describing it, and it is very clear that the goal of the project is not to use AI to teach coding, but more to provide a constrained, hackable sandbox environment with a deliberately impaired scripting language -- so, lots of "basic building blocks" as you say. Was there something else in the post that I missed?
  - 2mo ago
insane_dreamer 2mo ago
I've been teaching my 9 year old to code using Ruby, the best language to start with IMO: Clear, expressive English, object oriented is intuitive, and we're using Ruby2D to make simple terminal-based games. I prefer it to graphical-oriented languages like Scratch, as I think working with pure text and typing the commands out is a good experience.
piker 2mo ago
https://last-outpost.com https://last-outpost.com was my first experience with MUDs, and it's still being developed today. I'll never forget the time we finally got AOL + winsock.dll to combine for a telnet session into it. Now I'm teaching my son how to read on the same server.
rryan 2mo ago
CircleMUD was my first intro to C and network programming. I was at a computer camp for 8-10 year olds that taught BASIC. One of the counsellors was doing their undergrad at caltech and pulled the students who were bored by BASIC into a separate group to learn C by editing CircleMUD. Hacking up a pre-existing MUD was the perfect mix of immediacy / interactivity and fun to hook me. So thankful to that guy, wherever he is. He probably changed the course of my life.
inguz 2mo ago
This is great. Would prefer an eight-year-old play/explore/build in this sort of world than just about anything else!
jakewins 2mo ago
Related: I just discovered this weekend that you can trivially flash Lego power hubs and then program them from a browser via pybricks. I don’t want my 7yo to have a phone or iPad, so he’s not been able to use the PoweredUp hubs unless I’m there and can lend him my phone :( But he has a nixos laptop, and after flashing the hubs he can now program Lego technic with Scratch, no iPad or phone needed :)
darepublic 2mo ago
thanks for sharing! I am not happy with the 'kids learn 2 code' space.. which is usually just a bunch of pseudo code move commands to make a character traverse a maze. I think the learning ceiling on this kind of setup is low. but this seems like something much better. I have myself been doing more ai-powered coding / learning projects with my kids. a ton of potential in this space.
koinedad 2mo ago
Love the limited wish function!
bramadityaw 2mo ago
this is a great project! would love to use this when I get to teach programming again
skrellm 2mo ago
I understand this very well. I've also created a tool (a virtual fantasy console in my case) to teach my kids programming, called MEG4. Then I've created an engine in it to create very similar text-based adventure games like this one. I've also used a similar low-level language to describe the game logic. Later I've ported the engine into a native app (Win, Linux, WASM) with more features, like point'n'click interface (the bytecode remained backward compatible, it can play games created with the fantasy console). https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/meg4_advgame https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/meg4_advgame As a demonstration, I've ported a classic C= 64 game, you can try it out here (runs in the browser too). This game was a pretty big deal in my country in the '80s, and its creator was legendary. https://bztsrc.gitlab.io/meg4_advgame/idoregesz.html https://bztsrc.gitlab.io/meg4_advgame/idoregesz.html The description of the language, the bytecode, and the engine et al can be found here https://bztsrc.gitlab.io/meg4_advgame/ https://bztsrc.gitlab.io/meg4_advgame/ for those who are interested. The C= 64 game's source also available in the repo. Full disclosure: my solution is 100% AI-free.

269 points by andrewjanke 2mo ago

I loved MUDs as a kid, and really do miss the sense of immersion and depth that came from joining a long established server and just exploring.

debo_ 2mo ago
I had a blast in the late 2000s joining dead MUDs and just wandering around. It was utterly bizarre, in a good way. It also felt somewhat shocking when someone else actually signed in.
Aurornis 2mo ago
I have a love/hate relationship with my memories of the MUD era. I loved exploring different worlds and interacting with some of the brilliant people who took the time to help teach and encourage others. I was a casual who would disappear for months at a time when doing real world things, but it was comforting to be able to come back a little community of people building fun things. The couple MUD communities I participated in eventually collapsed under drama explosions from terminally online people. Some really manipulative and cruel stuff from people who would present themselves as noble community leaders, work themselves into positions of power, then grind down everyone in the out group until the rest of the community stopped playing. I would log in to a couple of them once a year. It was the same small ingroup of people idling away. All the recent posts on the in-game message board were from the new people complaining, admonishing, or introducing more rules to tighten their grip on anyone who remained. Really sad to see the same pattern collapse multiple different communities in the same way.
- shevy-java 2mo ago
  It seems you only had exposure to a limited set of MUDs that died quickly. I played some MUDs that were quite solid; PaderMUD/Xyllomer in the late 1990s (peak count connection at about 60 different people in late 1998). GEAS (similar code base) was also quite ok-ish up to 2013, though admin made too many mistakes (Asralites, aka the warclergy, were pimp-nerfed via divine codex to disallow them from starting wars, the old 'who' was stolen by PO Allalltar and PO Okkita and many more mistakes). But community wise both had many great roleplayers and your description appears to be hugely one-sided in that you never found competent roleplayers that would narrate a storyline (or usually several, if you had enough players) at the same time. Often "drama" is just roleplay and reaction by characters to in-game situations. I am aware that some players sabotage(d) MUDs and cliques rose past 1998 or so; and many older players gave up due to lack of time and what not. So the genre struggled already past 1998 and maintaining MUDs was much harder. But things such as "grind down everyone" can only happen if the rules are broken and the code is broken really. I also highly doubt that players were the primary "until the rest of the community stopped playing" as a problem - perhaps it applies to the MUDs you frequented, but very clearly this was not the case for all MUDs, so I suspect you had a very limited set of exposure to MUDs. I mentioned two; you did not mention any MUD specifically. Can you mention which MUDs you played extensively for a while? As for pattern collapsing MUDs, I actually agree; in particular those who held the monopoly over the game code, can really quickly ruin a game. This does not even happen deliberately all of the time; old admin stopped playing their own MUDs and after +30 years they no longer understand why some code changes ruined the MUD. It's a tragedy without a good fix, because they are old and lack time to play, so they slowly stop understanding the game they still make code changes to.
  - Aurornis 2mo ago
    > It seems you only had exposure to a limited set of MUDs that died quickly Limited set, yes. I was never a hardcore player. I would drop in for some months, then disappear again for months as I had other things going on in my life. Quickly, no. Some of the MUDs are still running today (as I mentioned) but my in and out nature made the dramatic changes more obvious. I would spend the summer away doing something, and come back to discover someone new had worked their way into the admin staff and was stirring the pot at every opportunity. One time I came back and the MUD was taken offline because the staff was infighting so much about it. > But things such as "grind down everyone" can only happen if the rules are broken and the code is broken really. I also highly doubt that players were the primary "until the rest of the community stopped playing" as a problem I'm not pretending my experience was common to all MUDs because I didn't play a large number. However the ones I did play eventually succumbed to admin and staff drama. Your assumption is backwards: It wasn't the people breaking rules who were causing problems. It was the people who were making rules. Some of them came up with increasingly specific things that were decided to be against an ever longer list of rules, which became the weapon which they could wield against anyone they didn't like. Temporary bans and restrictions were handed out selectively to their political adversaries.
    - Modified3019 2mo ago
      Yeah what you’ve described a basically how I saw many forums collapse over the years as well. While they all have the basic problems of bringing in and retaining users, many stacked on top of those issues an unremovable set of hostile admins/mods driving away people from the kingdom they usurped. The people who have the most time and energy to give for moderation, are the same ones most in love with the control for it’s own sake.
      - Aurornis 2mo ago
        It's a pattern I see in a lot of communities now. Some of the open source projects I follow have had their communities collapse the same way: Some group comes in with all smiles and energy to help out, then they brings their friends into the upper ranks because they say they need more help, then they start pushing agendas and adding rules to give themselves more power, then finally they just exhaust everyone else who isn't interested in fighting the battles every time they log on to do something. The few remaining forums I frequent have survived because they have no tolerance for admins who push their own agendas. They've all erred on the side of minimal rules and bans only in extreme cases. Every forum I've been on that went all-in on rules and heavy moderation has collapsed, or at least driven away the core users and left roaming packs of ingroup people who care more about picking apart everyone else than being part of the community. It's weird how many different places I've watched this happen online.
ButlerianJihad 2mo ago
It is very strange to me when people refer generically to "MUD" and cannot even seem to qualify what type of MUD they refer to. Since the advent of MUD gaming, there has been a wide variety of codebases, servers, and clients, with distinct genealogical lineages, that appeal to quite distinct sectors of nerd-dom, and sometimes with very little overlap in the player base. The original big-3 "non-Tiny" MUDs were: AberMUD, DikuMUD, and LPMud. These were largely unknown to me as I never played any of them, but they were mostly known as combat-based, player-programmable, and even quite distinctly European, for the most part. I could be wrong. TinyMUD Classic began at CMU with Jim Aspnes, but quicky a lot of forks developed that resulted in MUCK, MUSH, MOO, FuzzBall and other interesting derivatives. The Tiny* class shared a lot of playerbase, because the appeal was mostly the same; all were user-extensible but only some were programmable; none were combat-based or adversarial. They mostly tended to evolve into social and chat functions, once they were established and built-up. There are plenty of other MUD types and in the 90s, every budding programmer had ideas and forked a codebase for their own purposes. But it still baffles me, when commenters here and there wax nostalgic about those MUD days, I really have no idea what sort of game they're referring to, if they cannot be more specific.
- vector_spaces 2mo ago
  I expect that people who mention MUDs largely do not expect anyone to know what they are talking about, since these games have nearly always been tiny and nowhere near even nerd pop culture. At least this has been my experience -- so I will prefer to say "I am playing this game called Hesperia/Achaea/Discworld/whatever, which is like a text-based RPG" and avoid even the "MUD" terminology. Further, I expect an even smaller subset of people who have played MUDs are aware of the 'distinct genealogical lineages' you describe. As someone who spent my teens browsing mudconnector and dabbling in lots of random MUDs listed there, I started hazily noticing patterns in structure, design, mechanics, and even networking to some extent, and suspecting that certain games existed within specific 'traditions' of MUD development or even used similar libraries or frameworks, but I didn't have the context or curiosity to dig deeper. Like everything, this can be modeled as a funnel: of the relatively small number of people on planet Earth who know that MUDs exist, only a tiny fraction has even connected to one, an even tinier fraction of those spent meaningful time on one, and an even smaller number of these who have thought to contextualize and taxonomize what they were played Anyway, I am curious what level of specificity would you find normal?

groffl 2mo ago

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clemailacct1 2mo ago
Yikes, this is a bit too harsh.
skinfaxi 2mo ago
What? The article even states there's only one use of AI. What are you talking about? > Wish is the only AI feature in Canon, and it’s strictly limited to a single tutorial item per day. In a gameworld where everything else is explicitly written by humans for humans. And that alone was instantly polarizing.
- philipwhiuk 2mo ago
  It's the only AI feature available to users in Canon but the entirety of Canon itself is also vibecoded.
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  - eddieroger 2mo ago
    So we can't enjoy driving a car unless we build it ourselves? Can't cook with knives we didn't forge? They made something together and used it to - by hand - create more, including the capability to extend what it created. From the kid's perspective, the coder not yet able, it's no different than if her dad created the language from scratch.
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ricardobeat 2mo ago
It's a bit obvious that the game uses AI from the first screenshot.

zabzonk 2mo ago

I honestly think the child would be far better served with Scratch rather than some half-assed adventure writing language (having created several such languages myself). Edit: To clarify, the languages I created were also half-assed - it's very difficult to create a good one.

hombre_fatal 2mo ago
I think the only thing that matters is whatever the kid finds appealing enough to do at all. e.g. I started with Ruby on Rails. Not even Ruby. The feedback loop is what convinced me that I wanted to write software and then dive into the fundamentals.
a022311 2mo ago
I'd say Canon and Scratch are different tools with different purposes. Both are simple and interactive enough for children to love. The main difference I see is that Canon abstracts away a lot of the game state management logic and you get to focus on creating characters, items and having lots of fun. Scratch looks like it has a steeper learning curve and while it is a good introduction to programming, it gets pretty hard to navigate once project size increases. As someone who started programming with Scratch, I think that making a text adventure game like the ones Canon does in Scratch would be much more complicated and the end result wouldn't be half as nice.
andrewstuart 2mo ago
Scratch is so bad I think it must put kids off. It makes zero sense to start people off in an actually bad programming environment. Try Snap! Instead of Scratch.
- myhf 2mo ago
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cmrdporcupine 2mo ago
My kids got bored and annoyed by Scratch very quickly.

compacct27 2mo ago

A MUD got me into programming, just wanted to make one myself. I was too young then. Now that I’m “grown”, every five years I feel like the kids these days have so many tools to make it easier or at least more knowable. Also, that ASCII art(or pixel art?) as the header looks serene. Any tips/rabbit holes on achieving that art style?

voidUpdate 2mo ago
Looks like it's just dithered pixel art. The JS in the page isn't obfuscated, and I'm not an expert but it looks like the image is being dynamically generated, and then there's a bayer dithering with some extra random jitter

mentos 2mo ago

The Yoink used in the end was a word/action I first came across in Ultima Online when players would yoink steal an item from another players backpack. Curious if that’s coincidence or if players of UO brought that over most likely from MUDs.

axus 2mo ago
I don't know him, but Raph Koster (and Richard Garriot) definitely played a few MUDs.
WorldMaker 2mo ago
EverQuest and Ultima Online had a huge overlap with MUDs of their time. Both in terms of developer experience (parts of EverQuest allegedly came about by starting from a Diku MUD codebase; several UO designers such as Raph Koster had been MUD devs and/or "wizards"/admins) and also player experience (many of the earliest players and their vocabulary coming from MUDs of the day and/or playing both).

Bluescreenbuddy 2mo ago

Sounds like an ad disguised as an article.

saidnooneever 2mo ago
Guy made something and wrote a blog about it. What else is on here actually? Do you want to read more about AI benchmarks and Bitcoin???
justusthane 2mo ago
It's an in-depth post about something neat that someone made. Exactly what I want to read on here.
Hugsbox 2mo ago
Author doesn't appear to be selling it, just showing it off.
chrysoprace 2mo ago
Given Canon is invite-only and most of the article is breaking down the technical implementation, that seems highly unlikely.

saidnooneever 2mo ago

comment section is quite critical/harsh? for no good reason? I think this is an awesome project for them both. And it's totally understandable to use an LLM for the base project as it's a 'fun' thing from the read. it doesn't look like it's trying to compete with anything.... The kid can learn within an environment created by parent, so they can also collaborate on improving that environment, while the kid also has their own learning _within_ that environment. This seems like a wonderfully geeky adventure to go on if ur kid enjoys it :D love it. hope it will spark some cool interactions between them and make some epic memories :) Also, maybe people forget how it was like back in the day. I am not _too_ old - pentium 1 was my first PC. I learned making games in PASCAL, QBASIC and later custom C implementations that came with like 'gamemaker ' CDs etc. this was all very complicated to learn at a young age... Had to get many books and things (no internet!) at the PC shop to try and get my head around it. Never quite did until much later in my life! Sure things like Scratch exists, but this beauty of this one is that this one is _theirs_. Surely we can recognize the enjoyment that might bring to a parent and kids' lives? Learning is a bonus! Not everything is about being technically the best of the best -_- stop being Marines at everyhting. We're not at war with eachother over who writes the best code. Good use of LLM technology to make a project in my mind. props!

12ah6 2mo ago
Top comment is quite naive. With that populist rhetoric you can defend anything.
- d4mi3n 2mo ago
  Can we contribute to the dialog rather than bash someone’s thoughts on it? As a start, why do you disagree and how would you further this discussion?
  - andrewstuart 2mo ago
    Cause they are anti LLM and it seems such people need to not just have their stance but whack everyone with it.

jblakey 2mo ago

It's nice to see my old MUD is still online, and my account is still there, 30 years later!:) https://gatewaymud.org/ https://gatewaymud.org/

liveoneggs 2mo ago

I remember trying the various MUSH/MUCK/MOO variants and being out of my depth.

animanoir 2mo ago

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12345hn6789 2mo ago

A bit sad to see the author "10xing" his passion project with LLMs. I ended up moving one of my older projects in a similar way and I feel gross about it now. As if I didn't even work on it originally. I may just hard reset the LLM commits off my tree entirely at this point. Hopefully he doesn't come to regret it either.

ashd123 2mo ago
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Benjamin_Dobell 2mo ago

This is extremely interesting to me. I also have an 8 year old daughter who inspired me to build tooling for kids to create their own games. However, what I've come up with is quite different than this. https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids The primary mechanism through which kids create their game worlds is taking photos of their own hand drawn artwork. I found traditional game dev tooling was far too technical and verbose for my daughter to stay interested. Honestly, it's not just a matter of her losing interest due to the complexity. Frankly, I don't want her sitting in front of a screen that long. She's a kid and I want her doing typical kid stuff. She and her younger sisters play sports, draw, paint, perform magic shows, and sing and dance around the house like complete nutbags — and I love it! So whilst what I've built is highly technical for me to maintain, I'm not trying to expose all that complexity to kids. At least, not yet. I'm mostly interested in fueling creativity and letting kids explore. That's not to say kids that want to dive deep can't — we offer visual coding experiences etc. The intent is kids gain access to new features through self directed exploration and play. If some kids stop at just play, that's OK. The primary game mechanics (drawing and building worlds) are still inherently creative. Although my approach is different, there is a heap in this article I resonant with. The hacking mentality, and letting kids go beyond the artificial constraints in particular. There's still much of Breaka Club that I can improve on. I'm running a limited in-school pilot at present and that's already yielded some really interesting insights. I'm really keen to continue to see what others put out in this space. I think it's drastically underserved and there's plenty of room for multiple approaches.

sgt 2mo ago
I've seen your concept, it's a really good idea!
kerblang 2mo ago
Using the kids' own artwork is a cool idea.

imadierich 2mo ago

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mickeyp 2mo ago

MUDs are such a wonderful way to introduce kids to "slow gaming", if one can call it that. I grew up with MUDs; they are a cherished memory of mine. There's a lot of fun "lego-style" creativity to be had in designing rooms, mobs and coming up with grand area designs. Cool idea.

jason-johnson 2mo ago
I find it strange to call it "slow gaming" but I guess it depends on what you're doing. If you're doing PVP, it feels like one of the fastest versions of that possible.

njoyablpnting 2mo ago

Have been teaching coding to kids professionally for a while now. Ultimately what works is what the kid will engage in. Some kids bounce off of Scratch completely but then get totally hooked on text programming. I've been following what little has been published around teaching coding with AI, I'd say it's inconclusive at best which also tracks with my experience. We don't totally ignore it, since it is a standard development tool now, but if the environment is not tightly constrained it can be detrimental, it can quickly spit out a bunch of code that makes the student very overwhelmed. You'd be surprised what kids can make once you give them the basic building blocks: https://jump.academy/projects/fruit-drop https://jump.academy/projects/fruit-drop Sometimes we will let them use AI to make a focused change to their project, like "make the character do a flip when he jumps", then they're getting a fairly controlled diff surrounded by a ton of context, which I think really does boost their coding "literacy". I'd rather my students be able to read code well than write a for loop from memory, so I've found it useful in that sense.

abadar 2mo ago
That was fun. Emma did a great job building Fruit Drop!
vector_spaces 2mo ago
The comments on this HN thread are all very confusing to me and making me wonder if I read a different article altogether. For instance, I am wondering what exactly you are responding to with this comment, since the game described in the article is not really about teaching the kid to code with AI at all? I mean, what you wrote is interesting, but it isn't really topical The blog post that I read mentions a single generative AI feature baked into the game that allows the player to create a single item once per day using a text prompt. But it is one single feature with limited uses. The blog post devotes very little ink towards describing it, and it is very clear that the goal of the project is not to use AI to teach coding, but more to provide a constrained, hackable sandbox environment with a deliberately impaired scripting language -- so, lots of "basic building blocks" as you say. Was there something else in the post that I missed?
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insane_dreamer 2mo ago

I've been teaching my 9 year old to code using Ruby, the best language to start with IMO: Clear, expressive English, object oriented is intuitive, and we're using Ruby2D to make simple terminal-based games. I prefer it to graphical-oriented languages like Scratch, as I think working with pure text and typing the commands out is a good experience.

piker 2mo ago

https://last-outpost.com https://last-outpost.com was my first experience with MUDs, and it's still being developed today. I'll never forget the time we finally got AOL + winsock.dll to combine for a telnet session into it. Now I'm teaching my son how to read on the same server.

rryan 2mo ago

CircleMUD was my first intro to C and network programming. I was at a computer camp for 8-10 year olds that taught BASIC. One of the counsellors was doing their undergrad at caltech and pulled the students who were bored by BASIC into a separate group to learn C by editing CircleMUD. Hacking up a pre-existing MUD was the perfect mix of immediacy / interactivity and fun to hook me. So thankful to that guy, wherever he is. He probably changed the course of my life.

inguz 2mo ago

This is great. Would prefer an eight-year-old play/explore/build in this sort of world than just about anything else!

jakewins 2mo ago

Related: I just discovered this weekend that you can trivially flash Lego power hubs and then program them from a browser via pybricks. I don’t want my 7yo to have a phone or iPad, so he’s not been able to use the PoweredUp hubs unless I’m there and can lend him my phone :( But he has a nixos laptop, and after flashing the hubs he can now program Lego technic with Scratch, no iPad or phone needed :)

darepublic 2mo ago

thanks for sharing! I am not happy with the 'kids learn 2 code' space.. which is usually just a bunch of pseudo code move commands to make a character traverse a maze. I think the learning ceiling on this kind of setup is low. but this seems like something much better. I have myself been doing more ai-powered coding / learning projects with my kids. a ton of potential in this space.

koinedad 2mo ago

Love the limited wish function!

bramadityaw 2mo ago

this is a great project! would love to use this when I get to teach programming again

skrellm 2mo ago

I understand this very well. I've also created a tool (a virtual fantasy console in my case) to teach my kids programming, called MEG4. Then I've created an engine in it to create very similar text-based adventure games like this one. I've also used a similar low-level language to describe the game logic. Later I've ported the engine into a native app (Win, Linux, WASM) with more features, like point'n'click interface (the bytecode remained backward compatible, it can play games created with the fantasy console). https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/meg4_advgame https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/meg4_advgame As a demonstration, I've ported a classic C= 64 game, you can try it out here (runs in the browser too). This game was a pretty big deal in my country in the '80s, and its creator was legendary. https://bztsrc.gitlab.io/meg4_advgame/idoregesz.html https://bztsrc.gitlab.io/meg4_advgame/idoregesz.html The description of the language, the bytecode, and the engine et al can be found here https://bztsrc.gitlab.io/meg4_advgame/ https://bztsrc.gitlab.io/meg4_advgame/ for those who are interested. The C= 64 game's source also available in the repo. Full disclosure: my solution is 100% AI-free.