itch.io

Thanks for the rapid and thoughtful response, I agree with all of your sentiments.

I am new to this community, I will check out Discord. I wasn’t aware of the survey: were the results published anywhere? Was the survey conducted in Discord? It may bear out a topic here or a web page or a community wiki.

As a product manager, I know that not every customer request is valid, but often reveals a more general need, separate deeper problem, or latent expectation. I think classic M.U.L.E. is a real pinnacle of game design and UI: simpler is better on so many levels! Of course, everything was necessarily resource constrained in the 8-bit days. But messing with the game design could be death of brilliance by a thousand cuts or tweaks, so I appreciate your caution. Perhaps any “enhancements” could be defeatable with a Classic mode.

Some more clarification:

Yes, in multi-player, the discussions that happen during the auctions is critical (and fondly remembered) and not reflected in game play. Perhaps it is my nostalgic recollection that the accelerated timer was faster. So my thoughts are really around modern pacing expectations and in retrospect, perhaps my request is limited to single player only.

One additional thought to address this: perhaps the auction pacing accelerator doesn’t need to be a game play and UI element, but could be a game play setting in Options, perhaps an offline auction timeout acceleration factor?

For all of the skips during the non-human player actions/updates, I struggled on my first play though to find and then later remember which single button on the controller (PS5 Dualsense, turns out it was X) could trigger the other player update skips. Because the Atari joystick back from those days had a single button that triggered these skips, I think a small argument could be made that any of the Playstation face buttons (X, triangle, square, circle) could increase the accessibility of skips in these sections.

For the round summary animation skips (IIRC from the original): this would cancel the animation and just display the final result standings.

Thanks for your consideration.

Is there a priority roadmap list? :)

Excellent! I wonder if collusion was in the game documentation from back then… Looks like it was, makes sense it was tournament only: http://muttoo.on.ca/mulemanual/

Hello, I'm so happy to have found this after having successfully emulated MULE on Linux, but always having controller issues over the years. Everything just worked perfectly on first purchase and run today, thank you!

Some ideas to help speed an offline playthrough:

• Make each auction timeout defeatable: it speeds up if no player is moving, however I would appreciate if the auction could end quicker.
  • Perhaps allowing each player to traverse further on the Y axis past their initial place to indicate accelerating or cancelling the timer. If no players are moving and all human players vote to accelerate/cancel: activate. I imagine this could a simple way to indicate their intended participation in the auction.
  • This turned out to be the longest drag because it is dead play time.
  • Could multiplayer auction defeatable timeouts be abused?
• Because the original game developers allowed acceleration of updates, please make all controller buttons:
  
  • accelerate the non-human player updates: not just the primary action button (X on a Playstation controller)
  • skip animation to progressively display the round summary (the players march horizontally, then upward).

Thanks so much, really happy with the state of M.U.L.E. in 2024, I can share this with my family!

New purchaser today, just did a quick beginner one player round and it worked flawlessly on Linux with a PS5 USB connection controller.
We had an Atari 800 and M.U.L.E. was one of the first games purchased on floppy disc; I still love this game and soundtrack!

I had no idea about collusion back then https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/M.U.L.E.#Trading_Stage until reading this post today, so I won't miss it. But that's pretty cool to learn after all these years!