My Ancient Text Adventures.
This was sorta inspired by some comments by Corvus and Rubes in the "Why RPGs Suck" thread, and all the talk about Zork inspired by Matt Barton's awesome History of Zork article.

I only completed writing two text-adventure games in my life (not including the one about the harpies)... both when I was a teenager. Both using all custom code in BASIC for the Commodore 64. I never really knew about code-reuse back then - nor were there many tools for doing so - so "shared code" involved me printing out code from one game, and then using the printout to re-write it for the new game. Ah, the joys of BASIC programming on "home computers" in the 1980's knew no bounds...

My first full-fledged text adventure was called "The Dungeons of Doom." It was as horrible as the title. It had some colored text and sound effects (plus a horrible little musical intro), and some of the worst adventure game design ever imagined. It had a two-word parser, though I put in some code to eliminate some extra words, like articles. So it would correctly handle the command, "open the door."

Dungeons of Doom primarily consisted of monsters that had to be defeated with special weapons, plus a couple of additional puzzles to get said special weapons. One of the special weapons was a spear of lightning. This weapon was so powerful it would kill any monster in the game. But it could only be used once, and was then destroyed. What seemed very clever to me at the time (hey, I was 14 or so!) was that it was the only weapon that could kill the minotaur in the maze. So if you actually did use it to kill any other monster, you were hosed. Even your saved game (I think I allowed only one saved game) would be stuck with the game in an unwinnable state.

In a nod to the solution to the dragon puzzle in the "Colossal Cave Adventure," the dragon in the Dungeons of Doom could be defeated by putting a muzzle on it. I left the actual trick of how you managed to get the muzzle on the dragon up to the imagination. I think the text description read something like, "In an astonishing display of cleverness, you manage to muzzle the dragon!"

My next adventure game, "The Secret of Red Hill Pass," was much more ambitious, complex, and had a much nicer parser. It still wasn't something that would give Zork a run for its money. But it would parse out the verb and object of the sentence with a reasonable degree of accuracy, and would even (IIRC) parse out some adjectives to distinguish the green door from the red door. It had somewhere around 100 rooms, tons of inventory items floating around, and even a thief - though he wasn't nearly as mobile (or as useful) as the one in Zork.

I don't remember as much about that game, though I was much more proud of it than Dungeons of Doom. I do remember, after I was done with the game, trying to figure out what the real secret of Red Hill Pass was. Other than the fact that there was a mysterious, logic-defying dungeon complex underneath a manor overlooking the pass, there really wasn't any.

As a side-note, Red Hill Pass was resurrected in a persistent Neverwinter Nights module I ran for friends a year or so ago. Nobody else knew what it was named after, but smiled every time the players entered the map.

Neither game was played by anyone outside of my circle of friends. I wish I still had the code for them. The code would no doubt be horrible to behold, but it would be fun to get a better look at my formative coding years. I suspect I'd have a lot of fun playing them, but I'm not sure anybody else would.


(Vaguely) related nuggets of adventuresomeness:
* How Do I Get Past the Harpies?
* A Twisty Little Maze of Passages, All Different
* Losing Your Limits Without Losing Your Mind
.

Labels: Adventure Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:00 AM (Permalink)