[noodles]

I read this thread and see people handwaving that they could, or have, created a MUD from scratch in what others have dismissed as an infeasible amount of time. And two thoughts are raised, firstly what exactly constitutes the MUD they have created, and secondly whether scratch is all it is claimed to be.

Not all games are equal. One person's MUD completed in a short development period, may only be a small shadow of another's longer term perpetual development project. This is not necessarily a given, but well, when subjective claims are being bandied around who knows.

It is a lot easier to implement something you have implemented before. Even if you are not reusing code, you may simply be reconstructing systems that you have constructed before. Maybe you only worked on it part time, and you implemented a flash client, and you have six kids and two fingers on each hand. Regardless, an achievement of a certain goal does not mean that all achievements of that goal are equal. It maybe be that you develop in flash (is the technical term flashturbate?) professionally.

I don't mean to pick on the poster who the last paragraph attemts to parody in order to highlight the point I was trying to make, it was simply the possibilities that came to mind. The fact is that I could write a game completely from scratch in a week, if I knew ahead of time what I was going to make. The game design, or an existing idea I was going to pretty much adopt. The game systems, or existing ones that I was going to remake.

Fair? Not fair?