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| playground:cdeezpages [2024/01/03 13:59] – clarissadunst | playground:cdeezpages [2024/01/27 07:51] (current) – clarissadunst |
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| ====== The Improbable Island Forums ====== | ====== Legend of the Green Dragon (LotGD) ====== |
| | > http://www.lotgd.net/home.php |
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| BAN THIS SICK FILTH.((...Or was that the tagline of the enquirer?)) | HERE BE DRAGONS. |
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| Way, way, way back when Improbable Island launched in 2008((Yes, we're treating the 00's as the distant past now. I'm so sorry.)), text based games were still considered a brand spankin' new medium. There was no guidebook on how to gather feedback from players because very few people had actually tried. But forums? Yeah, we know those. They're slow. Easier to link to interesting comments than in the 2,000 IRC channels in a trenchcoat that make up the island. That oughta do it. | //Legend of the Green Dragon// is Improbable Island's precursor, and a re-imagining of an even older roleplaying game //[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_of_the_Red_Dragon|Legend of the Red Dragon]]//. |
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| So CMJ made a forum. And they were fun - but to quote, //"bloody useless for helping with game design."//((I feel weird having sources for a wiki article. Even said source is literally on the main page right now. Someone vandalise my notes already.)) | bla bla bla article outline here |
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| bla bla bla some things the forums were used for: | * Same overarching gameplay structure. Guy arrives in town, gets told theres a dragon they need to kill, trains against masters until they hit level 14 and then goes off to slay the dragon. kill the dragon, start over from level one. It has more of a fantasy flair than the island's science fiction, of course. As well as the Pilot's weird turn-based system instead of Stamina. But the beats are all there. |
| * **Posting Bug Reports:** The pilot had a petition system much like the one we know today, but those weren't made public, and everyone kept posting the same shit over and over again by mistake. So, season one introduced a bug report //forum// - which proved too unwieldy to navigate and keep track of reliably. Then people started using a page on the Old Wiki like a stoneage Google Doc, [[https://oldwiki.improbableisland.com/doku.php?id=season_one_bugs|and that was a right mess]], and finally we stapled the petition button to the old wiki page to get the //public// petition system we know and use today.\\ \\ | * Source of a good number of the island's mechanics and a couple of the NPCs. (e.g. the Forest became the Jungle, the Graveyard became the Failboat, Drive Kills are still referred to as Dragon Kills in the hall of fame, etc.)((Seth the Bard is an exception - he's actually from the original Red Dragon game!)) |
| * **Monster Idea submissions:** Prior to the addition of the monster sighting tent in the Jungle, people would post their writing in the appropriate forum section. Again, this was a pain in the ass to track. And it came with a side effect of your writing being laid bare for the whole internet to see, which wasn't a problem in 2008, but may cause latent psychic damage to anyone realising some random Australian is currently reading their standup comedy and judging their work some fifteen years later.\\ \\ | * Legend of the Green Dragon is an old game, originally being written in the original php script. (For comparison's sake: at the time of writing, the island runs on PHP8.) Originally created by Eric Stevens, but the code is now being maintained by the Dragonprime Development Team. The Dragonprime engine was released under a Creative Commons license, meaning anyone is free to yoink the code and host their own version of the game. |
| * **Holding conversations:** Allegedly. I feel like the world's shittest archeologist.\\ \\ | * And so that's what CMJ did - after getting rid of all the dragons and rejiggering the hell out of the code. |
| * **Probably some other stuff:** Can you tell I never had a forum account? | * While there's not much left of the original LotGD code in the game, we wouldn't be here without the hard work of the devs of old. If you enjoy your time on the island, and have some cash to spare, you can find a link to donate to Eric's paypal on the Island's donation page. Just click the coin slot and scroll down a bit. |
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| Years of hopping servers took their toll on the forums. By 2017, nobody was able to sign up or make new posts. And by November 2023, the fifth((Maybe??)) server move finally killed them stone dead - offlining them entirely and taking every dumb comment we've ever said there out of the public eye forever.((...Okay, I know this isn't technically true, given I've looked at backups to write some of these articles. But I'm not opening that can of worms in public. It could get creepy.)) | |
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| ====== A History of the Bingo Hall, As Written By A Scholary Type ====== | ====== A History of the Bingo Hall, As Written By A Scholary Type ====== |
| * [[https://oldwiki.improbableisland.com/doku.php?id=season_two_changelog|Season Two changelog]]. Only I could find this interesting. | * [[https://oldwiki.improbableisland.com/doku.php?id=season_two_changelog|Season Two changelog]]. Only I could find this interesting. |
| * jesus. things you post on the internet really do stay forever. hello, person reading this. | * jesus. things you post on the internet really do stay forever. hello, person reading this. |
| | * [[https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/trains-|Trains!]] - Holy shit, the Improbable Trains Compendium pdf listed here has a full analysis of Train functionality. delicious historical preservation |
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| ===== Before ===== | ===== Before ===== |