Tue, 22 Nov 2005
If you’ve been into computers as long as I have then you remember text adventure games like ZORK. OK, fess up, how many of you have been eaten by a Grue? In any case, an article on Slashdot last week was talking about text adventure games or “Interactive Fiction” (IF). Well, that got me thinking about about IF and how writing a text adventure game might be an interesting writing excercise. So there ya go, I need to do some research on how these games are created. My first thought was to build my own text adventure building software, but then I had a sudden fit of sanity and decided to do a BIT more research. After searching SourceForge and playing with Google I came upon ADRIFT ADRIFT is an excelent example of adventure building software. The demo allows you to build an adventure with a maximum of 10 rooms but other than that all the features are enabled. It took all of about 3 days of playing around with Adrift before I decided it was worth registering. And at less than $19 it’s a cheap way to play around with IF. Writing Interactive Fiction is a great combination of writing and programming. The writing part obviously comes from writing the room descriptions, dialog, object descriptions while the programming part comes from setting up actions and conditions such as : Only allow the player to open the safe if they’ve found the envelope with the combination written on it EVEN IF they enter the correct combination. So I’ve been geeking out and writing an adventure about a CIA agent who has to retrieve some stolen laser weapon plans from a Russian spy. Since the project I’m working on at my job is pretty unsatisfying it’s kind of nice to do something geeky and technical at home. My brain needs a little challenge like that every now and then. If you want to play some of these games (all of which are free) go to the ADRIFT web site and download the Adrift runner program. Then go to the Adventures section of the website and download games to your heart’s content.This story is from the
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