Things That Were
In the early 1980s text adventure games were popular on the home microcomputers
of the day; the TRS-80,
Sinclair ZX81, Sinclair
ZX Spectrum and the Acorn
BBC Micro. My school friends and I spent countless hours battling the creations
of Scott Adams,
Brian Howarth,
Level 9 and
Artic Computing.
I loved these games and, being a hobbyist programmer, decided to create one
of my own. Thus was born The Scepter, which was written
mainly in ZX81
BASIC with a smattering of
Z80 machine code. To my everlasting surprise
Bug-Byte Software agreed to publish the game, under the title
Adventure.
After writing a couple of reasonably successful arcade game clones and beta
testing Adventure D -
Espionage Island for
Artic I suggested
a continuation of their series. They agreed and the resulting game became
Adventure E - The Golden Apple, which was
well received.
My final effort in the commercial world was
Artic's
Adventure F - The Eye of Bain. This was a collaboration
between myself as programmer, a chap called Ken Gosling as story designer and
two graphic artists at Artic.
Things That Are
In July 2003 I was looking for ideas for a non-trivial project to help gain
practical experience of the
C# language and
the .NET Framework,
while improving my HTML
and CSS. Perhaps I could
write a new text adventure and publish it on the web - there must be some other
"old-school" gamers like myself who would like to play a new adventure. After
all, the medium died out years ago. Didn't it?
In Web Browser
You are in a web browsing application. All human knowledge is at your fingertips.
>search internet for adventures
You search.
In Google Results
You are shocked by what you see; a landscape vast beyond comprehension. There
are exits in all directions. You see an Inform, a TADS, a Hugo and an ADRIFT.
Shades of many more touch the edges of your vision. Adam Cadre, Roger Firth,
Nick Montfort, Graham Nelson, Andrew Plotkin, Mike Roberts, Emily Short, and
Campbell Wild are here. Myriad others voice their opinion; authors, programmers,
designers and players alike. Finally you see David Cornelson. He speaks of IF#.
You scream!
What followed was several months of reading articles, manuals and newsgroup
posts. I started to get a little jaded with the idea of writing a new game;
I'd lost sight of why I originally wanted to do something new. I'd become concerned
that my prose wouldn't be up to scratch, that my plot would be too derivative,
that I'd be reinventing several types of wheel and that the IF community would
not even bother to play my effort as it wasn't going to run in the z-machine.
Eventually I decided the best way to get started
was to put my worries aside and just get started. This site is the first step.
Things That Have Not Yet Come To Pass
These are the technologies I want to learn or improve my existing knowledge
of during the project:
Each of the items listed below is an area of IF technology that I want to
explore. As I get my notes and thoughts into order I shall expand the list and create additional
pages with specifics:
Comprehensive world model
Grammar definition
Parser generation
Command interpreter
User interface