Adriencoin

Adriencoin is a text-based socially- and economically- driven MMORPG. You work and trade for resources to become rich. It is what eventually grew into Endian.

History

Adriencoin was originally made as a social experiment by my friend Elliot Han. He made a Discord server and outlined a set of rules (a lot of rules).

For context, everything was themed after my friend Adrien Lee (and Hypixel Skyblock, but that's not important right now).

When you joined the server, you would tell Elliot which job you wanted. Then, there was one channel where you could send a message once every six hours to do your job and get resources. Each time you worked, you would get some Adriencoin and a resource specific to your job. For example, a lumberjack would get Adriencoin and Wood for working.

With your Adriencoin and your resources, you could buy items or upgrades from the shop (some of which only existed to flex your wealth). Since you could only get one resource from your job, players were forced into trading with others.

Something which you must understand is that there was no code involved in this version of Adriencoin. Everything that happened was fully moderated by Elliot, all by hand. As I'm sure you can imagine, this got increasingly difficult for him over time, and the game eventually slowed to a stop.

Season 2

Since my friends and I had a lot of fun playing Adriencoin, we were sad to see it go. I wanted to keep playing, but I definitely did not want to take on the job of managing everybody's inventories. That is why I made the Discord bot.

I made the bot in C++, with the DPP library.

The bot provided specific commands which could be run to play the game. This meant that everything happened automatically and that save data was stored in the bot's server.

I was able to update the game multiple times, and it lasted for a few months. It had a good run, but development eventually stalled, mostly because of poor design choices which I made in the code architecture. Essentially, it became increasingly difficult to add features as the codebase grew.

Lessons and Growth

Making Adriencoin was an amazing experience for me. Most notably, it was the first project of mine that people actually used. It is is a really amazing feeling to know that your friends are having fun with something that you made.

Furthermore, Adriencoin was a multiplayer and live-service game. If there was a bug, I had to fix it as soon as possible- or risk crashing the servers, losing items, etc. If there weren't any new updates, the game would get boring. This gave me more motivation than I have ever had to actually get work done on a project.

For example, once I had an undefined behavior bug from missing an early return in a player-related function. When one of my friends joined, his inventory started with over a million Adriencoin, rather than zero.

This was already a couple months after the game had started, so I was very worried that the economy would crash immediately. Even worse, this meant that there was even more (terribly written) code which I had to scour through for the source of the bug.

Something else this taught me was the value of using Git in an organized manner. When I had to release a hotfix or a patch, my code changes were nicely seperated into different branches. This meant that even if I had a large content update in the works, I was able to deploy a stable version of the codebase without losing any progress.

Unintentional Philosophy

I don't think that Elliot or I realized this at the time, but Adriencoin filled a really specific niche that could be valuable to more than just my friend group.

Here's what I think:

MMORPG's (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) were originally made as a wrapper around a chatroom. In the early days of the internet, all that people wanted to do was talk to each other. So, some people had the idea to put a game around it.

The value of these games was not necessarily the game itself, but the fact that you could hang out with other people. You could skill with them, run dungeons with them, or kill a big monster with them.

Modern MMO's, however, are more like a singleplayer game in the context of other people. Games like Runescape, WOW, or Hypixel Skyblock hardly ever require you to interact with others. And when you do, you don't really want to talk because everybody is extremely toxic and rude.

On the other hand, Adriencoin brings the MMO back to the chat room. By literally being inside of Discord, the place where every gamer goes to talk, they do exactly that: talk.

If you go into the Adriencoin server to run the /work command, that is likely not the only thing you will do. Maybe you will browse the shop, see something which you are close to buying, but realize that you are short on carrots. Then, you send a message to somebody who has the Farmer job, offering some Adriencoin for their carrots. The conversation continues, etc, etc.

Hopefully you can see the value in this. Adriencoin elicits social interaction, something which the world needs a lot more of in this day and age.

This idea is now being developed as a part of Endian.

Made with

by Colin