TweetMUD is a silly little project that I threw together, just to see if I could.

Its a MUD (multi-user dungeon) game that runs in Twitter. It still runs very slowly, and is missing some functionality, but it appears to be working.

There’s a quick and dirty website here with instructions on how to play.

The way it works is that you post messages to the “bot” (or using its name as a hashtag). The bot listens for mentions, picks up your username, processes the game commands, and sends back a response. I still need to implement inventory and armor.

Twitter’s “you already tweeted this” functionality is getting in the way a bit. I find that it is necessary to put a random number at the end of commands in order to make it work properly.

The game is built using Zend Framework, and particularly Zend’s OAuth module, which makes it fairly simple to integrate into Twitter.

Total development time was about 3 days (with lots of breaks to work in customer’s projects). If nice people sponsor me, I’ll put in more effort to add functionality, make it run faster, and add levels. A polished game of this nature is probably a few week’s worth of work, particularly if it integrates picture posting (i.e. images of the room you are in).

Oh and please excuse the silly humor. I tried to make everything as ridiculous as possible, in order to demonstrate that this is just a feasibility test for building Twitter games.