A Teaser For You Retro Fanatics .. Text Adventures Ftw!


skeezix

skeezix

Internal Development
Joined
Mar 11, 2003
Messages
8,070
Website
www.codejedi.com
I've been slowly working on this for awhile; since I know you're all dieing in your chairs, thought I'd add a little pain :)

http://www.codejedi.com/pandora/kronos/screenshots/kronos001.png

If any of you have been following me since the old Palm OS days (Palm, Tapwave) you may remember Kronos for Palm OS; this is a from ground rewrite of course, for Pandora (that will run also on Windows, Linux, OSX, etc). I've got a lot to go yet (add the picture-frame for games with artwork, add some onscreen controls so you can tap on word suggestions), add cheats and note taking (auto-mapper and such); but just thought I'd like to show -- text adventures are coming soon for the first real mobile game device that can support them (has a keyboard :)

Maybe I'm the only text adventure nutbar around, but I just have to keep The Pawn and Zork handy (and people are still creating new adventures all the time, no joke.) This app of mine includes interpreters (written byh others) for Infocom/Zmachine (Zork etc), Magnetic Scrolls, and Scott Adams games.

Anyone interested in following news on this, or does no one care?

jeff
 
skeezix said:
Anyone interested in following news on this, or does no one care?
Click to expand...


AWESOME.

One of the reasons I ordered my Pandora was to do text adventures on the go with a full keyboard...

Do you have the images for The Pawn/Guild of Thieves working, or just the text?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Images too. I'm supporting the MAgnetic Scrolls base games, but not the MAgnetic Windows versions that came out later.

I think they had some basic audio and hints, though, so I may be able to pull those in later, but thats not on my list right now.

The way I'm doing the graphics is a floating window (takes up about 1/4 of the screen or so), normally on the top-right area. You can just move it around. I didn't want to just burn the top half of the screen with a centered image, seemed wasteful..

jeff
 
skeezix said:
I've been slowly working on this for awhile; since I know you're all dieing in your chairs, thought I'd add a little pain :)

http://www.codejedi....s/kronos001.png

If any of you have been following me since the old Palm OS days (Palm, Tapwave) you may remember Kronos for Palm OS; this is a from ground rewrite of course, for Pandora (that will run also on Windows, Linux, OSX, etc). I've got a lot to go yet (add the picture-frame for games with artwork, add some onscreen controls so you can tap on word suggestions), add cheats and note taking (auto-mapper and such); but just thought I'd like to show -- text adventures are coming soon for the first real mobile game device that can support them (has a keyboard :)

Maybe I'm the only text adventure nutbar around, but I just have to keep The Pawn and Zork handy (and people are still creating new adventures all the time, no joke.) This app of mine includes interpreters (written byh others) for Infocom/Zmachine (Zork etc), Magnetic Scrolls, and Scott Adams games.

Anyone interested in following news on this, or does no one care?

jeff
Click to expand...

I think it's interesting. I never really got to play the text adventures ( a few minutes here and there, never an in depth round of game play) So this is good news. Question. Will you be making some sort of info or application or anything as to make new games for your program? Graphical games may be out of my realm but maybe a text one would be manageable?
What language are the games written in? Basic? Something else? Could one make text adventures with Pictures as well?

Sorry to sound text adventure stupid, just trying to see what is possible. The only PC I had when I was younger had only a certain amount of software available on cassette and no one I knew had one but me. I missed out on the common systems most people had and the software they were accustomed to (Atari Computers, Commodore's - Amiga's, spectrum's etc) I had a Spectravideo SVI-328. I loved it. But it was rather limited in the grand scheme of things.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
skeezix said:
I've been slowly working on this for awhile; since I know you're all dieing in your chairs, thought I'd add a little pain :)

http://www.codejedi.com/pandora/kronos/screenshots/kronos001.png

If any of you have been following me since the old Palm OS days (Palm, Tapwave) you may remember Kronos for Palm OS; this is a from ground rewrite of course, for Pandora (that will run also on Windows, Linux, OSX, etc). I've got a lot to go yet (add the picture-frame for games with artwork, add some onscreen controls so you can tap on word suggestions), add cheats and note taking (auto-mapper and such); but just thought I'd like to show -- text adventures are coming soon for the first real mobile game device that can support them (has a keyboard :)

Maybe I'm the only text adventure nutbar around, but I just have to keep The Pawn and Zork handy (and people are still creating new adventures all the time, no joke.) This app of mine includes interpreters (written byh others) for Infocom/Zmachine (Zork etc), Magnetic Scrolls, and Scott Adams games.

Anyone interested in following news on this, or does no one care?

jeff
Click to expand...



Methinks you are likely to be eaten by a grue.


I'm all about the text adventure. I grew up playing pirate cove (aka pirates adventure) on the vic-20 cartridge.

918748_41245_front.jpg


My mum paid good money for it! I found out years later that you could just copy the game in from a magazine for the C64 and others.

The first thing I do on just about every Unix/linux box I make (be it a cat scanner, monitoring system, flouroscope, security) is play "adventure".

So yes. I'm out here listening.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Most text adventures are run within a VM (much like Java applications); Infocom/ZMachine is the most prolific (Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy, Zork, other classics), and someone (and the community of IF-ers) have built up a language, compiler, libraries, etc and so on to support composing new IF-games (IF being Interactive Fiction.)

So yeah, you can write new text adventures, which are supported on pretty much every device around.

Also, ScummVM supports some Sieraa style graphic adventures (and a billion other graphic adventures of course) and I think there are toolchains for some of those, too.

Start your searching the web for 'inform' and 'interactive fiction' .. they're a pretty cool community, since they're mot literary and artsy than coders (where as your average Quake-type coder is a coder or mathhead :)

jeff
 
Seems like it could also be used as a good ebook reader. Have you any plan on it?

I was thinking about writing a ebook reader with support to show images (in case you need to take a look at a map while you're reading, that would be very useful for books like "Song of Ice and Fire") and support to select a word and show its translation in another language (for reading books in original language without having to use a physical or separated dictionary).

As you have support form images and text in your project, I thought it could be possible to integrate it. What do you think?
 
Makes me want to get back playing MUD or MOO games... from my bed with the Pandora B)
 
Jeff - you're a legend !!! :D


This is going to be a brilliant idea for the Pandora.
Please keep up the good work and keep us posted on any news.
Thanks.
 
Comike -- what you're talking about is something we call a "web browser" ;)

Or a dedicated book reader (or pdf reader), for which there are many for Linux already. (I've often thought of writing a book reader, but there doesn't seem much point.)

This 'shell' is mostly aimed at the IF VMs, and is really just leveraging the QT widgets for much of the rendering; writing a book reader _Renderer_ is easy nowadays (use html!), but the harder part is the DRM and the file formats; ignoring DRM, most of them are easy (html and pdf are easy with existing views, rtf and epub are easy to parse.)

jeff
 
I've only ever played the "Behind closed doors" series from the Spectrum, I may have to try some of these out though.
 
Color me interested. I love text adventures/IF, and play the occasional 'modern' IF from the Inform community. I've also tried my hand at Inform 7, and making my own IF. It's harder than it looks! But it was fun!

I think I'll stick to my poems and short stories though. I'm just simply better at writing 'static' stories, than those that branch off every-which-way.

Though, have you actually seen the 'programming' language of Inform 7? There's nothing else like it in the world. An entire language written in plain English! I loved that. Easiest programming language I've ever had the pleasure of using. Takes a good five minutes to learn practically everything you'd need to. Haha! :D
 
ah, pain indeed! i still don't know how to open that g*******d box. well, maybe i'll finally find out after 20 years :)

thanks a lot, skeezix!
 
Barely scratched these when I was a kid - I was a lazy reader.

But now? Definitely psyched at the possibility of returning to all those gems I missed. Looking forward!
 
I used to love text adventures back in the day, completed quite a few too. I even wrote a few in G.A.C. (Graphic Adventure Creator) and The Quill on my Amstrad CPC. I haven't played one for years though.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

skeezix
Release Gargoyle For Pandora - Interactive Fiction / Text Adventure Package
2
Replies
30
Views
9K
Tramboi
T
Kojote
Release Pandora Launch Titles As Of 24 May 2010 (Pandora Misc)
Replies
16
Views
11K
GuSec
GuSec
Back
Top