How does this compare to something like BYOND? I realize it’s dated now but conceptually there are some similarities.
I hadn't heard of BYOND until just then. Sadly its website seems to be down, I would like to learn more about it.
Space station 13 was the big game for it.
It still is. There's been attempts at porting the game to modern engines (Space Station 14 having the most progress), but SS13 is still alive and well.
/tg/station's github is very interesting, too. About a dozen pull requests every week adding random features and bug fixes from random contributors. The game is constantly in flux, but they manage to keep everything feeling the same.
As a formally very active BYOND community member (joined 2003), BYOND's heyday was probably 15 years ago. Space Station 13 is its last vestige of relevance unfortunately. I've always wished for a new/updated equivalent version of it to crop up but nothing has really filled the same niche. It used to be a pretty vibrant community of (very) amateur game developers.
It seems it is going through a DDOS attack right now. https://www.reddit.com/r/BYOND/comments/1kl4bjs/byond_hub_do...
Some history of BYOND here: https://tig.fandom.com/wiki/BYOND
Basically it is a fully contained multi-user game development environment created by two friends, Dan and Tom around 2000. It has its own language, DM (DreamMaker), roughly based on C and Python. It has a map editor and server software. You would write a game and then host it and then anyone else who had the BYOND client software could connect to the server and run it. The server acted as the source of truth and the clients were effectively dumb clients just rendering. It had limitations (frankly a lot of limitations), but for the time it ran pretty damn well for reasonably sized 2d top down games. While you could publish your game to the BYOND site, you could also run it will no connection to the centralized BYOND hub.
The secret sauce was the combined game dev environment and how simple it made networking. You basically didn't have to think about any of it because the total game state was run by a server the you or someone else would host. The client just had to download the interface.
The development environment was bare bones but the language was so simple that it didn't really matter. Over simplifying but basically movable objects were of type "mob" and background tiles were of type "turf". Both inherited from "atom". You could also write like 5 lines of code defining 1 mob and 1 turf and walk around in your new world with others online. You could then add "verbs" basically functions that the mob could take and "procs" which are just all other functions you'd want to write.
You can read the language reference here on internet archive while the main site is down: https://web.archive.org/web/20200229044355/http://www.byond....
Some other links:
- Forum entry from 2000 by one of the creators https://web.archive.org/web/20250325092124/http://www.byond.com/forum/post/194515
- Getting started writing games post (formatting is all broken on this archived version but the text is there): https://web.archive.org/web/20190402034657/http://www.byond.com/forum/post/46230
- Interesting crash course on everything from 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzAzMtWa0u0
- Probably the biggest game that made it out of just cult following was NEStalgia: http://www.silkgames.com/nestalgia/