In the vein of having a driving goal to this blog (as well as having a motivating example for myself while exploring these new technologies), and also because its cool these days to have a "Project" of some kind to be working on, introducing:

Project: JadeMUD

Purpose:

Provide a compelling and functional HTML5 based MUD client, especially for touch interfaces such as tablets like the iPad.

Motivation:

I recently got back into playing MUDs (multi user dungeons) which are text-only RPGs. They are usually played over a telnet connection and there are various clients the can be used to connect to MUD servers (telnet, zMud, TinTin, Mudlet, etc). However, being text based games they require a lot of typing and hence attempting to play them on a touch device like an iPad is painful to say the least. Being as I like to use my iPad I would love a way to play, but using touch, instead of tons of typing. But instead of making a native iOS app, I figure this would be a great project to do in HTML5/JS and give a chance to learn more about that kind of development (a personal goal of mine) and get to work on/with MUDs which are tons of fun. Not to mention potentially giving a more natural interface than just text input at a console can provide and pull newcomers to mudding into the game. This worthy goal presents 3 main challenges as I see it right now. Maybe I'm being short sighted and there are many more obstacles to come :) but right now I see:

1. Piping MUD text input/output to the webpage
2. Understanding MUD protocols to talk to the server using compression (for instance) and background communication
3. Displaying everything onscreen in a touch friendly way

All of those seem overcomable and I have a plan of attack for each below in the Plan section.

Product:

Plan: