# Why I’m Building Satisfy - Date published: 2026-08-08 - Author: Stanislav Ageev - Canonical HTML: https://satisfy.dev/devlog/why-im-building-satisfy/ - Russian edition: https://satisfy.dev/ru/devlog/why-im-building-satisfy/ Since the early 2000s, I have been looking for the same game: a world that does not wait politely for the player, but remembers what happened and carries on. ## The worlds I found in text I fell for MUDs in the early 2000s and spent hundreds of hours in them. Most of all, I loved worlds where people truly inhabited their characters. Discworld MUD and Lusternia, by Iron Realms Entertainment, are still two of my favourites. No graphics sounds like a limitation. To me, it meant room to move. A place could exist in a few paragraphs; a character needed a name, a description and a voice. Instead of drawing every place and animating every action, a developer could spend that effort on the rules beneath them. That freedom changed what I expected from an online world. A map full of other players was no longer enough. I wanted inhabitants with reasons to act, quests that could grow complicated, and consequences that outlived the scene that caused them. ## What graphical MMOs left unchanged Graphical MMOs gave me beautiful places, but I kept running into the same mechanical walls. A quest could begin with an emergency and memorable characters; what I actually did was collect twenty rabbit ears, gather thirty herbs or visit a row of marked locations. The words changed. The structure rarely did. Worse, almost nothing changed because I had done it. The quest giver stayed in place, ready to need the same help from the next player. The world snapped back to its starting position. My character received a reward; the people and places around that character seldom had to live with the result. It is easy to see why. A graphical game has to create and test every animation, object, location and variation it shows. Sometimes representing a possibility costs so much that the possibility itself becomes unaffordable. Reusable content is the safe answer, and reusable content has to reset. ## The other kind of emptiness Sandbox MMOs pushed in the other direction. They offered systems, procedural generation and stories made through interaction between players. I value that freedom, but it often trades one kind of emptiness for another. A sandbox can offer territory, trade, conflict and construction while leaving out the people who make a world feel inhabited. There may be few meaningful NPCs, little history and no real quests beyond the goals players set for one another. Players must create not only their own stories, but almost the entire reason for the world to exist. I want the space between those extremes: a world with history and character, but not a museum of stories that reset; a sandbox that can surprise its players without asking them to supply every motive, conflict and consequence themselves. ## Why text still matters Text buys possibility. If words can represent an action clearly, it does not first need a new animation, model, cinematic or set of visual effects. That leaves more room for the things I care about: quests with several solutions, inhabitants with needs of their own, and consequences that can travel across the world. Text also gives us a chance to include people games often overlook. An interface built around the keyboard and tested with screen readers can serve blind and low-vision players better than one whose meaning is locked inside graphics. Text alone does not make a game accessible—we still have to design and test it properly—but it is a strong place to begin. For me, text is not a nostalgic substitute for graphics. It is the right medium for the questions I want the game to ask. ## Why now The name Satisfy is quite literal. I am trying to satisfy a long-standing hunger for a good, dynamic MMO—the game I have kept looking for and never quite found. Modern simulation and AI are why the attempt feels possible now. They can help a world handle more situations, let its inhabitants respond with more range, and turn structured events into natural language. But AI is not a living world. If it can invent anything whenever it likes, nothing it says has weight. The world still needs rules. Its inhabitants need real knowledge, needs, relationships and limits. A quest should exist because someone in the world needs something—not because a content dispenser has reset. What happens should enter the world’s history instead of vanishing behind a reward screen. The simulation gives events weight; language lets the world speak. That is where I think text games can go next. ## The game I want to reach I want Satisfy to become a world that does not put the player at the centre of the universe. Its people should carry on with their lives, remember what they witnessed, tell others and act on what they believe. The player can matter precisely because the world was already moving before they arrived. That is an ambitious destination, and the game is still an evolving prototype. This devlog will not pretend otherwise. It will record what we build, what players actually encounter, what fails and what we learn when we try again. All those years ago, a few lines of text made a world feel larger than the screen. I want to build enough behind the words that, when players push on that world, it finally pushes back.