Text adventuring

[sometimes99er]

Fell over another short piece of old XB coding. All it did was make some nice lowercase characters. And yes, then it printed a few lines of text to the screen.

Only 7 lines of character redefinition. Executed fairly quickly. Thought it would do nice with something - maybe even a text adventure, though it never really was my department, I did play a few, but was never hooked.

Text adventures are often trying to be a bit dark or scary. To make it exciting I guess. I had kept then original black foreground color for the text, and just changed the background color. Easy and effective. Dark red was chosen. Made the text fade just a bit, but still clear enough for reading.

Okay, I thought I might try and bring this one a bit further. With the Basic Compiler by Harry Wilhelm in mind.

I searched high and low, but I didn't find something simple enough. I didn't want to spend hours at this. Just wanted something to make it one step further. Thought about writing something on my own, but then English is not my native language. I don't think I have the time for setting an atmosphere. Would be good practice though.

Should it be action word oriented, maybe just walk around, pick up and use. Maybe just multiple choice. Or even just a yes and no. Started searching for short stories. Came across this storybytes.com. There's a link there saying "Lengthwise". Some of the really short ones were actually funny. Began to read the 128 words category. Settled for one.

The idea is to be presented by some text and the choice to just continue to read the story. Altered the story slightly to be in first person (or whatever you say in English) - for this text adventure type like dramatic effect.

Thought about adding some graphics, but chose not to. Started to format the text, which turned out to be the most boring part. Have to think about how to autoformat stuff in the future. Also realising that 28 characters is not a lot. Often you have to make some stupid decisions about where to break the line to make it readable, flow ... Full 40 column mode is unfortunately not an option just as it is.

Attached is compiled version - named "load", so it will as you probably know, autoload. Also in the zip is the source. Nothing fancy there.

 

Suggestions and feedback will be appreciated.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 3, 2017 by sometimes99er

[TEXAS_JOE]

I think the background / foreground colours are great, the font looks good, and with you're knowledge of programming you could turn this into something more!

 

I was thinking of writing an adventure myself, I wanted to base it upon Rockstar's "Red Dead Redemption" and wanted to somehow use Tursi's convert 9918 software to provide good images of a background. The player would then press a key to get back to the text-screen.

 

So far all my attempts have failed, mainly because once bitmapped graphics have been played with, sometimes it can cause some graphical problems without a reset.

 

You should definately keep going with this, the TI does'nt really have and good adventures, and I would love to see more of them!

[unhuman]

For the crap game competition, I wrote an adventure... It was obviously very simple and stupid, but it could be used as an example on how to hook up rooms, etc.

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/172691-crap-game-competition-toilet-adventure

Edited February 18, 2012 by unhuman