I’m writing a text adventure using Inform (the language the Zork series was written in), and I have a couple of rooms ready for playstesting. Here’s what you need to do:
- Using Firefox, install Gnusto, which is a runtime that lets you play these games in your browser.
- Download my little game and open it in Gnusto.
- Refresh your memory on how to play text adventures.
- Play through the game and post comments and suggestions here, e.g. if you find a bug or you the game wouldn’t let you do something reasonable.
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naltrexone
17 December 2004 at 4.59 am
Zipped around in your game a bit. I like the style of the writing a great deal!
I’ve retrieved the bottle of wine (and read the leaflet), eaten the sugar, and given a coin to the beggar. Is there anything else to test? I’m guessing that perhaps I should have tried to distract the waitress and take the sugar to the kitchen for use in the stew…
Only found one bug per-se:
If you give a coin to the beggar, you still have ten coins.
The other issues were mostly, I suspect, just a product of this being in early development. You can’t talk to the waitress or the beggar. You can’t smell the gruel nor refer to it by name. Trying to give the bowl to the waitress triggers the “take” (which is normal) but means you can’t give it to her. Some other objects are mentioned but not handled specifically.
A very nice start– it has atmosphere and a good writing style.
sbszine
17 December 2004 at 10.26 am
Thanks for checking it out, much appreciated. It’s very small at the moment, so it sounds like you’ve peered into every nook and cranny so far. The beggar and waitress can be spoken to using ASK WAITRESS ABOUT FOOD etc. Can I ask what syntax you used to talk to them? Hopefully I can add support for it.
The coins thing is definitely a bug, which doesn’t surprise me greatly as the bulk of the code is arcane coin mangement stuff. Maybe I should switch to a barter system…
Thanks again : )
naltrexone
17 December 2004 at 6.33 pm
I tried:
> waitress, hello
> talk to waitress
The bug giving the coin to the beggar appears to be specific to the beggar, not specific to coins. The coins work just fine if you drop them, take them, etc.
>get torch
Taken.
>give torch to beggar
The beggar tucks it away under his rags.
>i
You are carrying:
a maglite torch
ten copper coins
Maybe the beggar’s handler for Give returns true (I’ve handled this, the game engine doesn’t need to do so) when it ought to return false (I’ve done something but go ahead and do what you’d normally do also)?
I’ll post a transcript for you in a bit just to show you a few things I tried that did and didn’t work.
Out of curiousity, are you looking to expand this out into a full game
naltrexone
17 December 2004 at 6.46 pm
Transcript of play
sbszine
21 December 2004 at 11.35 am
Thanks a lot for the transcript; it’s extremely helpful. I’ve added some more conversational topics for the NPCs and fixed up the giving things problem (it was, as you suspected, returning true prematurely).
I am hoping to expand it into a two hour mini game and perhaps submit it in the next IF competition. This is my first try at writing Inform code, though, so I’m hoping to pick up the subtleties as I go.