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Cart #senbfija-2 | 2025-04-03 | Embed ▽ | License: CC4-BY-NC-SA
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I fixed the bug concerning the climbing function and I made some minor corrections. Sorry technohat, thinking about it twice, I preferred to keep the game in the spirit of those of the time like those that Bob Withers & Stephen O'Dea made: working with only 2 words for the actions. It's mainly that I have little time to do it differently and I'm not a very advanced programmer. Here, I mainly wanted to recreate a small text adventure game with graphics to give me an idea of ​​how it could look on the picotron console. The result is really cool! To succeed in the game, you must especially take note of all the possible verbs to use (they are all revealed after the intro of the game). I added in the update more feedback from the game because, when we did not do the right actions, the computer returned nothing to explain what was really happening. Now it is basically improved!

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If you type climb in the locked cell at the beginning of the game you end up in a blue room with a lever on the wall. there's no indication that there was an opening in the ceiling, so I'm guessing this is a bug. I then wandered around the maze and in the transporter room I typed climb again and ended up in the blue room. It also looks like the game could use a bit more verbose responses when you do things. For example, in the blue room I use the commands USE LEVER and the game doesn't give me any feedback. In text adventures, the more feedback you can give the player the better. With a bit of polishing, I think this game could be a winner.



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Oh, there's definitely a mistake! This needs to be fixed! I was too quick to post it here; I should have taken the time to look through it to see if there were any possible errors. It's true, as you said, I could have done a lot more tweaking to make the game much more enjoyable to play. When I have time, I'll work on improving this. Thanks for your comment! :-)
I'll let you know when there's an update here.

Excellent! I can't wait!

OK, I've had a chance to play through the updated version. Here are my thoughts. Hidden by a spoiler tag as there are spoilers.

  1. Straws should be straw. Straw is the plant while straws are what you use to drink with.

  2. Active should be activate. Though really it should be just be USE to simplify things. USE LEVER would be more natural to use than ACTIV(ATE) LEVER. You also have PUSH LEVER which should be PULL LEVER instead as you are PULLING the lever down.

  3. When using the computer and you have to DRINK POTION, there is no indication that DRINK is a word you can use. You should have HELP spit out a list of commands you can use in the game (within the game) and have the drink command added for sharp eyed people. Also, when you DRINK POTION a second time it says you drink it all up but it's still in the inventory and can be drunk again and again.

  4. When you try to do something that can't be done, the game says nothing happenning. Happenning is misspelled. It should be happening. Also, it really should be nothing IS happening or nothing happens!

  5. When you use the magic word to blow up the rocks it says nothing happenning even though something is definitely happening.

  6. LIGHT FLASHLIGHT is a bit awkward. Adding USE FLASHLIGHT would be better.

  7. You also have several dead ends. The first is not grabbing the key before falling down the hole. Your help message is actually helpful here. At least in this case it's not so bad because it's right near the beginning making it easy to get back there in short order. While text adventure games back in the day had lots of dead ends, nowadays it's considered bad game design. The other two dead ends definitely fall into this category. Using the record before the cassette makes it so the player is unable to proceed. Generally when you have something like this, it's usually a good idea to make a way for the player to escape the screw up. For example, place an intercom speaker in the room with the poster and you could have a broken part appear from the stereo that allows you access to another room where you can play a cassette over the intercom system. The final dead end is just downright cruel. Having the third magic word go instantly to a game over is not cool. Especially since it's right near the end of the game. A better thing would be to have it fade to black and make it SEEM like the game is over but if they say the magic word again it brings them right back where they were so they can keep playing.

  8. If you could add a bit of text to the description of Klaus Naomi of who he is, it should make that puzzle make more sense. I didn't know who he was and had to google him.

  9. Lastly, I got to Home and there doesn't appear to be much to do there. I'm assuming that that is the end of the game. If it is, a bit more clarity would help. Even using you've reached the end of the game and there's nothing more to do when you type HELP at that point would be nice.

Overall, a fun little adventure. Fixing the bugs and adding the quality of life suggestions I made would go a long way to making this an even better game.

if you have time, I suggest checking out the Digital Antiquarian. A man named Jimmy Maher has been going through adventure games from the beginning of computing and writing blog posts about them. The early years are filled with articles about text adventures and he brings up a lot of good points about text adventure game design, both good and bad. He's also compiled his blog posts into a series of e-books available for free download. He also compiled all of his blog posts about infocom text adventures into a single book, if you have time to read only one. https://www.filfre.net/the-digital-antiquarian-e-book-library/



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