7 ms·

The entrance to a small personal site

149 points by dbrereton 5y ago

kderbyma 5y ago
awesome - was thinking of doing something similar but for an ARG
c22 5y ago
I did this for a website once, but I just ran it on port 23 (telnet). The "game" version had all the same information and functionality as the more mainstream-designed www site on the same host. It ran for 4 years though and not once was it found or used by a real human as far as I can tell. Made me feel like the internet was really dead. I first discovered MUDs as a child while portscanning for open SMTP servers so I could send spoofed email to my friends. It really did used to be a different experience using the net.
- vmception 5y ago
  > I first discovered MUDs as a child while portscanning for open SMTP servers so I could send spoofed email to my friends a growing set of Gen Alpha kids are doing the same in "metaverse"-branded online worlds, but earning a little crypto here and there from whatever they launch or interact with and use it to buy knockoff jpeg apes maybe a lot of things make more sense with that knowledge, not a lot of people understand whats going on yet, but probably the same distribution of people that figured out children with computers were portscanning in whatever decade that was
  - astoor 5y ago
    Good analogy - portscanning and email spoofing was considered a relatively benign issue decades ago, but would be quite serious now and does lead to jail time, and I'm sure the same will be true with cryptocurrencies (unless you're in a failed state where the rule of law is a bug not a feature).
  - softwarebeware 5y ago
    > a growing set of Gen Alpha kids are doing the same in "metaverse"-branded online worlds, but earning a little crypto here and there from whatever they launch or interact with and use it to buy knockoff jpeg apes We really are approaching "Snow Crash" in real life
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
mrintellectual 5y ago
Reminds me of a text-based MMO called Alter Aeon (http://www.alteraeon.com http://www.alteraeon.com).
escapedmoose 5y ago
Oh this is lovely. I forgot how much fun text-based adventures are.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
Well played, sir. Well played.
luc_ 5y ago
I wish I could try `get flask`.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- totetsu 5y ago
  I think the syntax is 'get ye flask'
  - bitwize 5y ago
    You can't get ye flask.
abathur 5y ago
This thing is my fault, if anyone has questions/nits/etc. The usual one is whether the code is somewhere. The short term answer is no, but I did pick out a name and set up a repo for anyone interested to watch, if I ever get to that point: https://github.com/abathur/roomstead https://github.com/abathur/roomstead
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  All in all, I like it. Gameplay is missing a few niceties that you see in slightly more sophisticated games (but, I see you listed LPC as a programming language, so I assume you know that). For instance, if the visible exits are north and south, I can't 'go north'. Instead, I just have to enter 'north' as a command. Likewise, I can't 'look at' a thing; it's just 'look <thing>'. It'd also be great to be able to 'take', 'get', and 'drop' certain things. On the plus side, I like what happens when you do 'report bug'. At one time, I also considered making a resume kind of like this, except my idea was to embed it as JS code inside a PDF document. The PDF version of the resume doesn't look very good, though. It has a mostly blank first page with just a title, header, and footer when I 'print' it on my machine.
  - abathur 5y ago
    Interesting concept, re: embedding it in a PDF. Yes, the mechanics/mudlib are a bit sparse. It's stacked on top of a ~terminal JS library, but all of the ~MUD behavior is hand-rolled. It's a bit LP/LD-family-esque, but I've tried to completely exclude as many concepts (health, heartbeats, resets, classes, etc.) as I can get away with. (Though, if I abstract out and publish the ~game/mudlib layers at some point, I don't think I'd be opposed to it accumulating some features beyond my own golden path.)
- Jaruzel 5y ago
  Bug Report: On Chrome on Windows (on my PC at least) it auto scrolls up a bit too far, cropping off the top line slightly.
  - abathur 5y ago
memalign 5y ago
If you like this, you might also enjoy this (mobile)web friendly text game I made a while back: Dungeon Memalign[0] [0] https://memalign.github.io/m/dungeon/index.html https://memalign.github.io/m/dungeon/index.html
- Tijdreiziger 5y ago
  Fun game! I actually liked it so much that I submitted it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30866681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30866681 The map gets a bit hard to read for the 3-emoji rooms, though. Screenshot (spoilers!): https://i.imgur.com/4yDGeN8.png https://i.imgur.com/4yDGeN8.png I also nearly lost because I didn't go back after getting the gold key, but that might be on me, haha.
  - memalign 5y ago
    Thank you :) Yeah, I didn’t realize at the time that up-to-date emoji support wasn’t universal, even on the latest OS versions. The “extra” emoji are a result of your system not yet supporting some of the symbols used. I chose emoji more carefully in my next game, a demo of the excellent interactive fiction game Counterfeit Monkey originally by Emily Short: https://memalign.github.io/m/counterfeitmonkey/index.html https://memalign.github.io/m/counterfeitmonkey/index.html And a more jokey game of Pac-Man: https://memalign.github.io/m/pacmandungeon/index.html https://memalign.github.io/m/pacmandungeon/index.html
alephnan 5y ago
Reminds me of the promotion site for The Batman where you solve Riddler riddles. Just checked it out again, but apparently it's been seized by Gotham police https://www.rataalada.com/ https://www.rataalada.com/
nathias 5y ago
very nice
- egberts1 5y ago
  Where are the orcs?
shantnutiwari 5y ago
I have a small game to enter my site too, though mine is Twine based: https://shantnutiwari.com/ https://shantnutiwari.com/
mittermayr 5y ago
I sometimes wish text adventures would still have a bit more prominence today. It's nice to see games at super-high fidelity, but these old-fashioned text adventures are so "easy" to make, they're a fantastic way to get into programming as a hobby. As a kid, learning to code was reasonably easy because it was fun; I could make games for my family and friends, and at the time I started, not much was required other than access to a pirated disk of Turbo Pascal or Q-Basic. I remember when Mode 13h took over and things got a lot more complicated (and also fun, for those who could work it all out). Once I had mastered Mode 13h, a whole new world opened but I wondered how someone could dive into programming if that was the first hill to climb. And then the demo scene hit me, along with hacky but exciting 3D-2D projections, from plasmas and fractals to Voxel graphics (Commanche!), and that eventually required even more complicated maths that threw me out of the game-making. I remember at the time that I couldn't wait to "grow up" and reach a stage in school where they'd teach me the maths necessary to keep up with the requirements of game design at the time. I never returned to it, unfortunately. Text adventures were a fantastic and light-weight way into all of it. Every time I try to convince a kid to try and make one, they struggle to get excited about it. They want to make Minecraft and Fortnite, and I don't even know where to begin to explain. So, yeah. Time to learn Unity. For anyone curious to travel back in time over Christmas or so, here's a bit about Mode 13h: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_13h https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_13h And here's a nice book on Game Design of that era, around the infamous Wolfenstein 3D: https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbwolf3d.pdf https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbwolf3d.pdf
- discardedrefuse 5y ago
  > I sometimes wish text adventures would still have a bit more prominence today. Text adventures are still alive. Its just called Interactive Fiction now. There's also a whole bunch of modern (often open source) tools available to create them. Competitions: https://ifcomp.org/comp/2021 https://ifcomp.org/comp/2021 IFDB: https://ifdb.org/ https://ifdb.org/ Tools: https://itsfoss.com/create-interactive-fiction/ https://itsfoss.com/create-interactive-fiction/
tcspence 5y ago
Crap I was eaten by a grue

149 points by dbrereton 5y ago

awesome - was thinking of doing something similar but for an ARG

c22 5y ago

I did this for a website once, but I just ran it on port 23 (telnet). The "game" version had all the same information and functionality as the more mainstream-designed www site on the same host. It ran for 4 years though and not once was it found or used by a real human as far as I can tell. Made me feel like the internet was really dead. I first discovered MUDs as a child while portscanning for open SMTP servers so I could send spoofed email to my friends. It really did used to be a different experience using the net.

vmception 5y ago
> I first discovered MUDs as a child while portscanning for open SMTP servers so I could send spoofed email to my friends a growing set of Gen Alpha kids are doing the same in "metaverse"-branded online worlds, but earning a little crypto here and there from whatever they launch or interact with and use it to buy knockoff jpeg apes maybe a lot of things make more sense with that knowledge, not a lot of people understand whats going on yet, but probably the same distribution of people that figured out children with computers were portscanning in whatever decade that was
- astoor 5y ago
  Good analogy - portscanning and email spoofing was considered a relatively benign issue decades ago, but would be quite serious now and does lead to jail time, and I'm sure the same will be true with cryptocurrencies (unless you're in a failed state where the rule of law is a bug not a feature).
- softwarebeware 5y ago
  > a growing set of Gen Alpha kids are doing the same in "metaverse"-branded online worlds, but earning a little crypto here and there from whatever they launch or interact with and use it to buy knockoff jpeg apes We really are approaching "Snow Crash" in real life
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

mrintellectual 5y ago

Reminds me of a text-based MMO called Alter Aeon (http://www.alteraeon.com http://www.alteraeon.com).

escapedmoose 5y ago

Oh this is lovely. I forgot how much fun text-based adventures are.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

Well played, sir. Well played.

luc_ 5y ago

I wish I could try `get flask`.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
totetsu 5y ago
I think the syntax is 'get ye flask'
- bitwize 5y ago
  You can't get ye flask.

abathur 5y ago

This thing is my fault, if anyone has questions/nits/etc. The usual one is whether the code is somewhere. The short term answer is no, but I did pick out a name and set up a repo for anyone interested to watch, if I ever get to that point: https://github.com/abathur/roomstead https://github.com/abathur/roomstead

actually_a_dog 5y ago
All in all, I like it. Gameplay is missing a few niceties that you see in slightly more sophisticated games (but, I see you listed LPC as a programming language, so I assume you know that). For instance, if the visible exits are north and south, I can't 'go north'. Instead, I just have to enter 'north' as a command. Likewise, I can't 'look at' a thing; it's just 'look <thing>'. It'd also be great to be able to 'take', 'get', and 'drop' certain things. On the plus side, I like what happens when you do 'report bug'. At one time, I also considered making a resume kind of like this, except my idea was to embed it as JS code inside a PDF document. The PDF version of the resume doesn't look very good, though. It has a mostly blank first page with just a title, header, and footer when I 'print' it on my machine.
- abathur 5y ago
  Interesting concept, re: embedding it in a PDF. Yes, the mechanics/mudlib are a bit sparse. It's stacked on top of a ~terminal JS library, but all of the ~MUD behavior is hand-rolled. It's a bit LP/LD-family-esque, but I've tried to completely exclude as many concepts (health, heartbeats, resets, classes, etc.) as I can get away with. (Though, if I abstract out and publish the ~game/mudlib layers at some point, I don't think I'd be opposed to it accumulating some features beyond my own golden path.)
Jaruzel 5y ago
Bug Report: On Chrome on Windows (on my PC at least) it auto scrolls up a bit too far, cropping off the top line slightly.
- abathur 5y ago

memalign 5y ago

If you like this, you might also enjoy this (mobile)web friendly text game I made a while back: Dungeon Memalign[0] [0] https://memalign.github.io/m/dungeon/index.html https://memalign.github.io/m/dungeon/index.html

Tijdreiziger 5y ago
Fun game! I actually liked it so much that I submitted it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30866681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30866681 The map gets a bit hard to read for the 3-emoji rooms, though. Screenshot (spoilers!): https://i.imgur.com/4yDGeN8.png https://i.imgur.com/4yDGeN8.png I also nearly lost because I didn't go back after getting the gold key, but that might be on me, haha.
- memalign 5y ago
  Thank you :) Yeah, I didn’t realize at the time that up-to-date emoji support wasn’t universal, even on the latest OS versions. The “extra” emoji are a result of your system not yet supporting some of the symbols used. I chose emoji more carefully in my next game, a demo of the excellent interactive fiction game Counterfeit Monkey originally by Emily Short: https://memalign.github.io/m/counterfeitmonkey/index.html https://memalign.github.io/m/counterfeitmonkey/index.html And a more jokey game of Pac-Man: https://memalign.github.io/m/pacmandungeon/index.html https://memalign.github.io/m/pacmandungeon/index.html

alephnan 5y ago

Reminds me of the promotion site for The Batman where you solve Riddler riddles. Just checked it out again, but apparently it's been seized by Gotham police https://www.rataalada.com/ https://www.rataalada.com/

nathias 5y ago

very nice

egberts1 5y ago
Where are the orcs?

shantnutiwari 5y ago

I have a small game to enter my site too, though mine is Twine based: https://shantnutiwari.com/ https://shantnutiwari.com/

mittermayr 5y ago

I sometimes wish text adventures would still have a bit more prominence today. It's nice to see games at super-high fidelity, but these old-fashioned text adventures are so "easy" to make, they're a fantastic way to get into programming as a hobby. As a kid, learning to code was reasonably easy because it was fun; I could make games for my family and friends, and at the time I started, not much was required other than access to a pirated disk of Turbo Pascal or Q-Basic. I remember when Mode 13h took over and things got a lot more complicated (and also fun, for those who could work it all out). Once I had mastered Mode 13h, a whole new world opened but I wondered how someone could dive into programming if that was the first hill to climb. And then the demo scene hit me, along with hacky but exciting 3D-2D projections, from plasmas and fractals to Voxel graphics (Commanche!), and that eventually required even more complicated maths that threw me out of the game-making. I remember at the time that I couldn't wait to "grow up" and reach a stage in school where they'd teach me the maths necessary to keep up with the requirements of game design at the time. I never returned to it, unfortunately. Text adventures were a fantastic and light-weight way into all of it. Every time I try to convince a kid to try and make one, they struggle to get excited about it. They want to make Minecraft and Fortnite, and I don't even know where to begin to explain. So, yeah. Time to learn Unity. For anyone curious to travel back in time over Christmas or so, here's a bit about Mode 13h: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_13h https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_13h And here's a nice book on Game Design of that era, around the infamous Wolfenstein 3D: https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbwolf3d.pdf https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbwolf3d.pdf

discardedrefuse 5y ago
> I sometimes wish text adventures would still have a bit more prominence today. Text adventures are still alive. Its just called Interactive Fiction now. There's also a whole bunch of modern (often open source) tools available to create them. Competitions: https://ifcomp.org/comp/2021 https://ifcomp.org/comp/2021 IFDB: https://ifdb.org/ https://ifdb.org/ Tools: https://itsfoss.com/create-interactive-fiction/ https://itsfoss.com/create-interactive-fiction/

tcspence 5y ago

Crap I was eaten by a grue