I was considering making this a post mortem, but MUG isn't necessarily dead per se, I'm just not actively working on it anymore and have put it aside in favour of other projects.

A couple of different things happened, first I got sidetracked because of something I wrote in Devlog #1. I wrote that if I was ever going to revisit the multiplayer space strategy genre, I would make it more like Master of Orion. That made me rethink another online multiplayer strategy game I had previously tried to make: NukeNation. Maybe I could make NukeNation more like Master of Orion. So I started working on NukeNation again, making a server with Rust and Actix HTTP (having previously gained Rust and Actix experience developing Uncomment).

Before I got very far however, PBBG Jam 2022 was announced (I passively follow the PBBG development community on Discord). Normally I would not have participated, but the theme (“After The End”) coincided with me having recently spent some time playing Fallout 4. That, combined with the month-long duration, made me want to make a simple Fallout-inspired text-based PBBG.

So I spent a month building Underground Tomorrow and successfully had a running online game at the end of the jam. My game didn't win, but I was just happy with having finished on time. I did end up experiencing a little bit of a game development burnout afterwards though, so I shelved both NukeNation and MUG for several months after.

When I did finally try to get back into MUG a month ago, I couldn't quite regain my enthusiasm for making a mostly text-based game. So I started working on a graphical 2D RPG instead: Arq.

I may return to MUG in the future with fresh eyes and new ideas.