Limited Environments

This article came up on Hacker News yesterday about Canon, a simple MUD that the developer created to let his daughter make video games. Specifically, Multi-User Dungeon games. Although I’m just old enough to have played MUDs as a child, they weren’t a part of my youth. That said, I completely understand their appeal. There’s something really beautiful about limited environments and the creativity they inspire within those constraints. This post is going to review some experiences I had as a kid, and then reflect on what that might mean in 2026. Klik-N-Play The very first experience I had developing games was in an old windows 95 game development program named Klik-n-Play. It was a visual programming environment that allowed users to create games by dragging and dropping objects and defining their behaviors through simple event-based logic. It was so awesome. It was so terrible. First of all, credit where credit is due. The system had a massive library of fun animated graphics and…