itch.io

Welcome back to the Bardo!

The public stealth alpha testing period for The Bardo has begun as of February 2026. The game can be accessed via the client on this page or using any Telnet client at the alpha server testing address: 73.198.76.230 on port 1338

Stay tuned to this page for updates and feel free to ask questions or drop in and poke around!

Thanks,

-m

Visual scripting is considered normal at this point. At all times in technology the old guard will gatekeep using their methods as the correct ones. There's a lot of value in being able to type out code, but most people typing code into an editor have the editor typing so much of the code that it might as well be visual scripting anyway.

At the end of the day what visual scripting does is prevent you from making syntax errors by disallowing non-syntactical combinations of logic and eliminating typos all together except in fields.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with thinking about logic structure from that perspective as opposed to line by line as long as you understand that the scripting structure is generating lines which themselves are being interpreted down to bytecode and then into binary, the eternal language of on and off.

The game's pre-alpha period has ended (with the collapse of the cheap server that was hosting it). If you try to connect to the game currently, it will not work.

However, I plan to get things back up and running in the coming months and to release the server code itself so that the game can be run locally. The game page will remain up and active during that time although the game itself is currently inaccessible. Thank you for looking into The Bardo!

All relevant updates about my work are posted first on patreon.com/m -- if you want to know when the game is back, that's the place to find out.

I accidentally forgot to publish this post when I wrote it on 4-21, so it is chronologically out of order in the log. Schade.

So you've found this page, and you're trying to play whatever this game is but you're running into challenges!


TECHNICAL HELP/SOLUTIONS:

Windows doesn't trust your game! True, I dont have a cert apparently that will cost me a few hundred dollars. Here are your options to play:

• Trust me as a developer (ignore the pop-up, click "run anyway"), or run the game in a Virtual Machine or other such isolated environment for your safety.

or

• Download and import the source code .zip project file (listed below the .exe on the game page) using the Godot game engine, and run the game from there or compile it as an executable from within Godot.

or

• Run the game in a Telnet terminal. Telnet is an ancient protocol about as old as the Internet itself. Telnet "just works" in Linux terminals, or can be accessed using a MUD client such as Mudlet. If you want to play on iOS or Android, there are a variety of Telnet and MUD clients available for each, though I cannot speak to what will work best. Once you've acquired a Telnet client, simply connect to the address 73.198.76.230 on port 1338.

The screen is flickering! If you're curious about why this is happening on a technical level, scroll down to the section "What is this, technically?": But in practical terms there's a few things you can do to reduce the flicker. You should think of the map display in The Bardo as being a bit like a "digital radio" that has to be tuned. You can tune it by adjusting the refresh rate with "+" or "-" or by changing your view distance with "n" and "m".   Lower refresh rates (more map draws per second) means snappier feeling game response, but may induce flicker depending on your ping and connection type (lossier connections, like phones and maybe wifi in a dense wifi area may have more flickering as errors can emerge in the stream). If you are still having issues with flicker, the first half of this video may be able to help you understand better than this text did.

I'm stuck somewhere with no exits! There's a known bug where some caves have no excavated rooms immediately around the entrance. If you enter a cave and see a dark screen, press 'G' to go back through the cave to exit. If you are in a room with no exits you can try to dig away at the walls (using "tunnel" or "excavate" abilities, if you have them) to escape or use the "STUCK" command in the input/command line to be teleported to a random new location. In addition if you build a bed, you can use the "HOME" command to return to that bed at any time.

I have feedback or some other question/something is broken/text is incorrect/etc:  Post it in this thread, or leave a comment on the Patreon and I will get back to you ASAP -- thank you for checking out the game!

GENERAL GAME INFORMATION:

What is this?: I grew up playing MUDs so I made a MUD. This page is the FAQ for the pre-alpha of The Bardo, an emoji-powered Rogue-like MUD with a custom Godot-based client. You can ask questions here or just reach me for any purpose like to cheer me on or whatever.

"What is this, technically?": On the back end is a Java server that I wrote from scratch, the front end is intended to be client agnostic, though it generally favors my custom client at the moment for colors and information display -- it is a fairly dumb terminal. Rather than communicating packets to a smart client, like most online games, the entire game of The Bardo happens inside of a raw TCP stream. This means there is no error correction, and transmission errors may manifest as glitches in the map rendering, as the map is fully rendered on the server and broadcast many times per second to each client. I think the idea of rendering a world in text and broadcasting it as a stream is amusing if not somewhat impractical in some ways, but I enjoy the challenge of "making it sort of work" and I believe with some effort, some day, I'll have this thing spitting out a 3d rendered world in terminals in an occasionally glitchy stream of text rendering.

What's the game though?: The Bardo is an exploration-driven procedurally generated Rogue-inspired online world. It is primarily about reincarnation, and is a highly randomized RPG. It's my answer to modern MMOs being garbage(imo), but it is very early in development, and will still be quite niche even when it is more finished.

What do you do in the game?:
Generally speaking you run around in a randomly generated world using a randomly generated character (you don't pick your class or race, they are generated randomly and reset randomly on death), and try to get stronger and find cool items and talk to people or PVP them or whatever you find to be fun. It is possible to ascend to King of the server, there is a dragon to slay, and there are many unique items to be found.

What's the theme of this?: The game happens inside of a game. It is populated by a variety of folklore creatures from all around the world, but abstractly, all of those folklore creatures exist inside of a game world where nothing is real. It is about coming to terms with impermanence and exploration, among other things.

DEVELOPER / PLATFORM FAQ:

When does the server source code come out?: The source code for the server, written in Java, will be released sometime this summer ideally. I would like to get the game much more functional before I drop the source, but the ultimate goal of the project is to be a public work, open sourced under MIT-0. If you're interested in contributing to this project as a developer, please feel free to make yourself known and say hi in game if you catch me online.

How can I play the game on <non-Windows platform>: You can either find a way to emulate the .exe file on your platform of choice, or you can download the Godot project file and source code from the game page. Alternatively, you can play the game in a less ideal but still playable state by simply connecting to 73.198.76.230 on port 1338 in any Telnet client.

Very rightfully annoyed, its an absurd situation to be in, but I'm glad my comment helped in some way. I did not know what to expect when I clicked on the game, but it left a huge impression that I think will stay with me forever.  Thanks for sharing your experience in such a unique way, and good luck!

Obviously this is very heavy, so I'll just comment on some of the American curiosities that came up in the story.

In the US, medical debt doesn't carry the same sort of credit penalties as other debt, so if we got this sort of bill we would generally just not pay it (I would literally throw it in the trash) -- or make incredibly small payments with the intent on dying long before the debt is settled.  I understand your situation is different due to the travel insurance company in the middle, but if the alternative is the subject of this game, I think the better option is to ignore the collectors and/or deal with the consequence as they come. Hopefully they will not be as bad as you imagine, or they will just give up like their American counterparts, who hopefully they have not yet paid in full. Other than that, I suspect your theory about the American missing data is correct, unfortunately.

Wishing you the best outcomes. Thanks for the game and Camus lesson!

My first released game is hard to play now because Flash is dead, but it was a falling block puzzle game with blocks and bubbles called "Oh, Buoy!" in 2007 or 2008 :)

My first game I EVER built I cannot show, but it was written in QBASIC around age 9, and I believe the text display looked something like:

"Please Guess A Number Between 1 and 50: "
And then you'd type something like "27" and the game would say:
"Your Number is Too High. Guess again:"
And then you'd guess like "13" and it would tell you it's too low, until you get the right answer and it would output:
"21 is the correct answer! It took you 4 guesses!"

Sick game right? :)

Great looking first game! Setting a release date is a fantastic way to fight against feature creep and make the hard decisions. Looking forward to playing it when it's out!

Super unique mechanic. I've seen dual character platforming puzzles before, but it's unique to me to see it done in such an asymmetrical way with a collision enemy. Super cool. I'm sure it gets even more interesting further in if the setup is this unique. Plays very forgiving and enjoyably for a p8 game!

sick soundtrack

This is the first time I've learned of QB64. QBasic was my first programming language back in the 90s, so there's a lot of nostalgia there for me. Hope you have the chance to make that bundle eventually, great idea to use the imagination graphics engine :)

I love this damn game. Thank you for making it.

Gives me lots of cool ideas and renewed my faith in humans and rodents. 10/10.

<3

hey gamers, i made a thing.
originally i wanted to make a bigger thing, but making things is hard as you know. so here's what we're left with, feedback welcome :)
https://damijin.itch.io/shroom-devil

It's playable and you released it, most people never get that far. Keep making stuff :)

Extremely pleasant experience, got all the expensive upgrades -- spent more time on it than expected :)