I was already a fairly creative writer when I got into MUDs, but my coding skills were weak and pretty disorganized. Programming a DIKU MUD back in the early 90s that people actually used and enjoyed required me to step up my focus and skills, which got me ready to enter the tech industry proper in the mid 90s.

In-world Lua is a great idea. All of the core MUD programming back then was, of course, written in C, but player (and admin) scripting was done with an embedded Perl interpreter.

Sounds awesome! I do have some built in methods to instantiate mobs, objects, and rooms, then save them to disk, but they're pretty basic and don't allow more advanced things like scripting events or locking doors and things like that.