Sometimes, IF you wait long enough...
I was playing some of the simple adventure games included in computer magazines pretty early on, and I suppose the thought of "making one myself" did come to me as I tried now and again to get started on the BASIC tutorials that came with my family's computers. It was easier to do things with "IF-THEN" statements than with parsing text strings, though, which made the very first "adventure game" I tried to peck into one of our Radio Shack Color Computers "just" a "Choose Your Own Adventure." I remember it had something to do with surviving on the moon, but I do have to admit I didn't get much further than a decision or two into it before I either got bored with the whole thing or just lost track of the "combinatorial explosion" and gave up without actually saving to cassette what I'd done.
A few years later, when our now-old computer magazines had turned up again after we'd moved and I was conscious of how I'd lost my chance to play all the other adventures games in the magazine ads and the catalog booklet that came with "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," I started working with Hypercard on the Macintosh SE/30 my father could bring home from work every so often and at the little Macintosh lab at high school to create what I thought would be "the ultimate Choose Your Own Adventure," one that would take the player to my impressions of what those games must have been like. As a "Choose Your Own Adventure," though, I suppose it amounted to "cargo cult programming," an awkward imitation of the real thing as if that would bring it back, and after making up a great many cards but only getting into the beginning of each small adventure I put the whole thing aside. Not that long afterwards, anyway, we had a new computer and the "Lost Treasures of Infocom" collections, and that kept me occupied for a while.
As soon as I had internet access, I started looking for information on the games in the second "Lost Treasures of Infocom" collection, which hadn't included a hint book, and found that some people had developed programming tools to write full-fledged text adventures with parsers that could read more than two words. That got my attention, but despite finding a manual and a "beginner's guide" to the interactive fiction language Inform it seemed too complicated to start trying myself. Some years after that, though, when I wasn't playing very many adventure games any more, I heard that Inform had been revamped into Inform 7, which now had a remarkable resemblance to regular English. It even seemed to be generally accepted by people programming new games, but aware that the rules of the language were still more complicated than "do what I want" I was still a bit slow to begin really looking at it. Along the way, getting the impression an interactive fiction get-together in my area was going to include a tutorial on the "CYOA" generator Twine, I installed that program on my portable computer and started a few simple experiments to get a feel for it. Unfortunately, I lost those files when the hard drive in that computer burned out.
Not that long ago, though, I saw a new "Inform 7 quick-start guide," and this time it seemed comprehensive and simple enough to understand that I downloaded the programming program itself and began working on some more simple experiments. While it was something to do that much (it took a while to sort out that the older Inform 7 tutorials used a deprecated syntax that wouldn't let me actually set up "win the game" situations), just that didn't seem worth making a big deal of. I got to thinking that beyond old ideas of a "miniature adventure" or two I could follow the lead of the tutorial, which shows how to recreate bits of "Crowther and Woods's original Adventure," and recreate the simpler version of the game William Crowther had worked on before Don Woods enlarged the map (if adding more fantastic environments to the map of an actual cave Crowther had explored himself), added more treasures, and put in a way to win the game.
In the process of pondering that and going back to some old sources, I noticed that someone had ported Crowther's original game from FORTRAN to the BASIC of the "Micro Color Computer," one of a flurry of mutually incompatible TRS-80 models Radio Shack introduced in 1983 before just happening to introduce a computer that ran MS-DOS at the end of that year and ending an era. (It wasn't a simple task to trade up from the Micro Color Computer to the regular Color Computer; the cassette tapes from the small machine would load on the big machine, but all the BASIC commands would turn out wrong.) The mild challenge of either getting a new emulator working or trying to load BASIC source into an old emulator didn't quite distract me from thoughts of Inform 7.
When I noticed that the "Adventure" page on the Interactive Fiction Database now included a screen shot from that just-mentioned BASIC version, though, I saw in the lengthy list of ports an Inform file of "Crowther's original Adventure," and went skedaddling to the IF Archive to download it. Somebody else had also had the idea of trying a "programming exercise"; however, in looking at his source code (which I am now beginning to understand) I did have the impression he had put more effort into matching just what happened in the original, almost experimental game than I had imagined. In any case, I do still have those ideas for a "miniature adventure" or two.
This entry was originally posted at http://krpalmer.dreamwidth.org/229715.html. Comment here or there (using OpenID) as you please.
A few years later, when our now-old computer magazines had turned up again after we'd moved and I was conscious of how I'd lost my chance to play all the other adventures games in the magazine ads and the catalog booklet that came with "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," I started working with Hypercard on the Macintosh SE/30 my father could bring home from work every so often and at the little Macintosh lab at high school to create what I thought would be "the ultimate Choose Your Own Adventure," one that would take the player to my impressions of what those games must have been like. As a "Choose Your Own Adventure," though, I suppose it amounted to "cargo cult programming," an awkward imitation of the real thing as if that would bring it back, and after making up a great many cards but only getting into the beginning of each small adventure I put the whole thing aside. Not that long afterwards, anyway, we had a new computer and the "Lost Treasures of Infocom" collections, and that kept me occupied for a while.
As soon as I had internet access, I started looking for information on the games in the second "Lost Treasures of Infocom" collection, which hadn't included a hint book, and found that some people had developed programming tools to write full-fledged text adventures with parsers that could read more than two words. That got my attention, but despite finding a manual and a "beginner's guide" to the interactive fiction language Inform it seemed too complicated to start trying myself. Some years after that, though, when I wasn't playing very many adventure games any more, I heard that Inform had been revamped into Inform 7, which now had a remarkable resemblance to regular English. It even seemed to be generally accepted by people programming new games, but aware that the rules of the language were still more complicated than "do what I want" I was still a bit slow to begin really looking at it. Along the way, getting the impression an interactive fiction get-together in my area was going to include a tutorial on the "CYOA" generator Twine, I installed that program on my portable computer and started a few simple experiments to get a feel for it. Unfortunately, I lost those files when the hard drive in that computer burned out.
Not that long ago, though, I saw a new "Inform 7 quick-start guide," and this time it seemed comprehensive and simple enough to understand that I downloaded the programming program itself and began working on some more simple experiments. While it was something to do that much (it took a while to sort out that the older Inform 7 tutorials used a deprecated syntax that wouldn't let me actually set up "win the game" situations), just that didn't seem worth making a big deal of. I got to thinking that beyond old ideas of a "miniature adventure" or two I could follow the lead of the tutorial, which shows how to recreate bits of "Crowther and Woods's original Adventure," and recreate the simpler version of the game William Crowther had worked on before Don Woods enlarged the map (if adding more fantastic environments to the map of an actual cave Crowther had explored himself), added more treasures, and put in a way to win the game.
In the process of pondering that and going back to some old sources, I noticed that someone had ported Crowther's original game from FORTRAN to the BASIC of the "Micro Color Computer," one of a flurry of mutually incompatible TRS-80 models Radio Shack introduced in 1983 before just happening to introduce a computer that ran MS-DOS at the end of that year and ending an era. (It wasn't a simple task to trade up from the Micro Color Computer to the regular Color Computer; the cassette tapes from the small machine would load on the big machine, but all the BASIC commands would turn out wrong.) The mild challenge of either getting a new emulator working or trying to load BASIC source into an old emulator didn't quite distract me from thoughts of Inform 7.
When I noticed that the "Adventure" page on the Interactive Fiction Database now included a screen shot from that just-mentioned BASIC version, though, I saw in the lengthy list of ports an Inform file of "Crowther's original Adventure," and went skedaddling to the IF Archive to download it. Somebody else had also had the idea of trying a "programming exercise"; however, in looking at his source code (which I am now beginning to understand) I did have the impression he had put more effort into matching just what happened in the original, almost experimental game than I had imagined. In any case, I do still have those ideas for a "miniature adventure" or two.
This entry was originally posted at http://krpalmer.dreamwidth.org/229715.html. Comment here or there (using OpenID) as you please.