A few fun text adventures

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Jubatian
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A few fun text adventures

Post by Jubatian »

I just stumbled upon these, and gave them a go, in part due to bringing up the idea of having some text adventures on the Uzebox.

Choice of Robots: https://www.choiceofgames.com/robots/ . It is not free, however the first two chapters are to get you immersed, and it is quite cheap. If you like the idea so much to play it through to the end of the demo, I am fairly sure you would buy it, well, nice idea to support independent developers then!

In overall this was something quite new to me, a very well thought out interactive novel, so much that for most part it can convince you that it is indeed your choices weaving the story, the writing just feels fine, the underlying design is plainly amazing in its capability to adapt and compose according to the choices made. They do matter. There are many ways to complete (or fail to complete) this one.

So I would say, a potentially great source of inspiration for such games, how they could be done so they are clear, easy to follow (it offers choices), yet building up a challenging, diverse world to explore.

Choice of the Dragon: https://www.choiceofgames.com/dragon/ . Actually the above drops a reference to this. This game isn't as good, but the idea is fun, and by that it's mechanics is not that perfect, you can gain some insight while playing it through (probably trying a few paths) how such games where the choices matter could operate. It is a free game.

These two are also a bit on-topic in that regard that this mechanic could be intuitive on the Uzebox as well, that is, choices, contrary to how old text adventures operated (entering verbs with a SNES controller would be rather awkward and deterring I guess).
CunningFellow
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Re: A few fun text adventures

Post by CunningFellow »

Not the same "choose your own adventure" style as the above. However you get a whole lot of content you can port over for very little coding effort with

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine

Rossum has done it on an AVR already

https://rossumblog.com/2011/04/19/zork- ... icrotouch/

And that would give you Zork, Planetfall, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and several others. Other people apart from infocom have also released free/non-commercial games in the ZIL language.
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uze6666
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Re: A few fun text adventures

Post by uze6666 »

I like that format, reminds me of a series of books when I was younger(sorry, it's in french). It would give you a page number to go based on your choice with a bit of random here and there. Was full of awesome pictures here and there. Eh, combining your SPI ram graphics mode with the 80 cols mode would yield a pretty awesome way of rendering those books. :D
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Jubatian
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Re: A few fun text adventures

Post by Jubatian »

uze6666 wrote: Mon Nov 25, 2019 6:25 am I like that format, reminds me of a series of books when I was younger(sorry, it's in french). It would give you a page number to go based on your choice with a bit of random here and there. Was full of awesome pictures here and there. Eh, combining your SPI ram graphics mode with the 80 cols mode would yield a pretty awesome way of rendering those books. :D
This wasn't unknown in Hungary either :) I know a bit of French, maybe it could even be interesting to try refreshing my rusting skills with the language! SPI video mode combined with text mode, definitely could be interesting, something I even thought about while designing it. Since with that the story itself would be sourced from RAM, the interpreter could go crazy filling up the ROM with graphics generation code anyway, probably even a .png decoder could be nice to store the images efficiently on the SD card. Speed isn't essential, nobody cares if it took a few frames to produce a scene!
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jhhoward
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Re: A few fun text adventures

Post by jhhoward »

A short while ago I developed a simple interactive fiction engine for the Arduboy which is also AVR based. I designed a basic scripting system for handling the logic. The Github repo is here:
https://github.com/jhhoward/MicroIF

It is designed around using a game controller so is more in the 'choose your own adventure' style rather than a parser based adventure. I made a demo which was an adaption of the starting rooms of Space Quest. The thread on the Arduboy forum has an emulator that you can play in your browser:
https://community.arduboy.com/t/space-q ... ngine/8172

It would be relatively easy to adapt to the Uzebox with a text-only video mode and potentially stream the game content from SD card.
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Jubatian
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Re: A few fun text adventures

Post by Jubatian »

jhhoward wrote: Tue Jan 07, 2020 11:12 am A short while ago I developed a simple interactive fiction engine for the Arduboy which is also AVR based. I designed a basic scripting system for handling the logic. The Github repo is here:
https://github.com/jhhoward/MicroIF
Huh, it looks pretty simple indeed! I took a look at various pieces of its code, nice! I might give it a try with the new Mode 80, which would be just the right match, also I didn't even compile C++ since a while, so it could be interesting to see how it fits together as a Uzebox application. Maybe even coming up with some approach to allow for merging the game itself into the .uze file to create small adventures fitting in a conventional ROM (without demanding SD), but of course streaming is also an option. Choice games are nice, those I posted on the top are such, the interface is pleasant, while lots of thought is put into them to make them really intereting and immersive!
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jhhoward
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Re: A few fun text adventures

Post by jhhoward »

I tried to keep the VM code simple as the Arduboy only has 32K of program memory (no SD card or expandable storage unless you mod it) and I wanted to reserve as much space as possible for the game data.

I've been able to compile C++ with the Uzebox library before, but I think I had to make some minor changes like adding an extern "C" {} block around the uzebox.h header and fix up a union/struct definition in kernel.h. That said, the code is simple enough to port to C.

The script compiler currently outputs a file that can be #include'd to be included at compile time, it looks like this:
https://github.com/jhhoward/MicroIF/blo ... Data.inc.h

And same for the compressed text strings:
https://github.com/jhhoward/MicroIF/blo ... Data.inc.h

Another Arduboy game of mine that could be ported to Uzebox is MicroCity, which is a SimCity clone:
https://github.com/jhhoward/MicroCity
It's written in C (even though files are .cpp) but would need more work to port to use Uzebox tiled modes (Arduboy uses a 128x64 1-bit framebuffer). Alternatively it would be possible to make a 128x64 1-bit framebuffer video mode for Uzebox. Since the Uzebox has double the RAM of the Arduboy it could be double buffered.
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