6 ms·

Show HN: A text adventure for developers

39 points by badbanana 12y ago

badbanana 12y ago
If you wish to give feedback or ask questions; please go ahead. I and a workmate did this at a work-related hackathon a couple weeks ago.
- willvarfar 12y ago
  One fun idea for you is to theme it as an IDE and code rather than a classic terminal text adventure? I tried it for an LD a while back but http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/The-Small-world-of-Professor-Strange_2.jpg http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Th... didn't really get the text itself to look like code from a squint test, nor get syntax completion finished in time.
  - badbanana 12y ago
    That's actually a super cool idea for a developer themed text game. Was it a web based game and is it still playable somewhere?
    - willvarfar 12y ago
      http://williame.github.io/ludum_dare_23_tiny_world/ http://williame.github.io/ludum_dare_23_tiny_world/ I've since been shown a nice IRSSI theme too: http://irssi.org/themefiles/c0ders.png http://irssi.org/themefiles/c0ders.png
- xtrumanx 12y ago
  The aesthetics does not make for easy reading. Never was interested in text adventures in the first place but the blurriness made me quit the game faster than I would have.
  - badbanana 12y ago
    Yeah you're not the only one saying that. I guess text games aren't what the kids want these days :) There should probably be a switch to turn off the bad screen effects.
- mkesper 12y ago
  I really hate green on black and would like to read in positive mode (black on white).
- teh_klev 12y ago
  Nice idea, but can you allow folks to turn off the fake flickering/display faults. It's hugely distracting. Also the CGA style font is kinda hard to read, perhaps you could allow folks to: - change the font - adjust the brightness and contrast Back in the day when I was a mini-computer engineer our terminal screens were much nicer and crisp.
- zyx321 12y ago
  Well, my first instinct on the design puzzle was something among the lines of http://xkcd.com/149/ http://xkcd.com/149/ I was a little surprised to get a "no such command" error, especially after finding out the actual solution...
- michaelmior 12y ago
  Thanks! That was some nice entertainment for the morning :)
- isxek 12y ago
  I had originally submitted this a few days ago (see: http://imgur.com/uCRZuU4 http://imgur.com/uCRZuU4), after learning about it from a game-related site (http://www.gnomeslair.com/2014/06/avaus-text-adventure-so-you-wish-to.html http://www.gnomeslair.com/2014/06/avaus-text-adventure-so-yo...). Never made it to the front page at all. I'm glad it did, eventually. Should I stick a "Show HN" the next time I find something? I'm hesitant to do so since I wasn't the one who wrote it.
JoshTriplett 12y ago
Slightly sad to see that "ask man about emacs" didn't work. I was pretty amused by the "Don't know anything about that" when queried about "open source", though. "look at tunnel" should work after opening the tunnel. I love the background changes. Why does "get container" not work? The response didn't give a reason. "Welcome to the developer console; you were kind of expected." made me laugh. ...why can I deploy the beard? The music at the end was unexpected.
- badbanana 12y ago
  Time constraints kept us from fleshing out all characters and descriptions. "get container" should give some feedback that you're not able to pick it up, so that'd be a bug then. Deploying the unix beard was a bug initially, but I left it in because I thought it was kind of funny.
  - JoshTriplett 12y ago
    > "get container" should give some feedback that you're not able to pick it up, so that'd be a bug then. It said I couldn't pick it up; it didn't describe, in-character, why.
icemelt8 12y ago
How to enter the convention
- badbanana 12y ago
  The guy in the beginning looked like the kind of guy who'd be able to enter. Now if you only had similar facial hair somehow..
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- xerophtye 12y ago
  Tip: "a Unix beard" is not a description of the bearded man. its another item on the list of things you see
pbjorklund 12y ago
Man, that took me back to a simpler time. I for one loved the green on black. But thats probably because I actually used green on black terminals back in my youth... Gj Carl-Petter and Juha!
gregchapple 12y ago
This is just a pet peeve of mine. I don't understand why you ask "Are you sure you want to leave this page" when I click back, or try to close the tab. I am sure - that's why I tried to leave. edit: fixed typo
- danielweber 12y ago
  Because someone accidentally closing the window would lose all game state.
Udo 12y ago
I absolutely love it. For the last LD I did a terminal-style game too, but it wasn't nearly as good. Forces the solution. You may need to use this if it fails without it. What's that Unix command line switch déjà vu I'm having there...
chingjun 12y ago
Yeah, a developer cannot get "design".
christudor 12y ago
I love this: found a few interesting tools on the internet as I went through it, which was a nice bonus.
pepijndevos 12y ago
Is it normal for text adventures you just have to try random stuff? I had no clue how to get design. I thought I had missed a clue from the developer maybe. Turned out I just needed to enter a command that was not introduced before, or listed in the help page.
- myhf 12y ago
  It was normal 30 years ago, as a cheap way to cut development time and pad play time. Parser technology and usability expectations have improved since then, but this piece is too committed to its retro aesthetic to care.
- michaelmior 12y ago
  The message when you try to get the design is a pretty big clue.
- moconnor 12y ago
  The source is also its own clue; just search for the error message and read the source around it. That's a strategy that works with many error messages in many programs, not just in this game.
imdsm 12y ago
I tried to `ask richard stallman about gnu`, among other things, but it wouldn't work. Also, I'd stop the blurring effect after a while, that really grated on me. I'd love to have time to try it properly.
- shreyas_310 12y ago
  Just ask man
tdicola 12y ago
Awesome, nice work! I love the retro CRT look. For folks that haven't played text adventures in a long time, check out the annual interactive fiction competition winners for some great modern ones: http://www.ifcomp.org http://www.ifcomp.org. They're meant to be played in about an hour, have hints, and usually don't rely on cheap deaths or other frustrating tropes of old games.
jariz 12y ago
How do I get past the wizard? I said 'neverdeployonfriday' but it's not working :(
- shreyas_310 12y ago
  I'm stuck there too...help!
- mp4box 12y ago
  try "say neverdeployonfriday"
  - markild 12y ago
    Ah.. Help text should really be updated.
    - ronaldx 12y ago
      It's traditional in text adventures that you infer un-helped verbs from the text (that is, if the verb is clued at all): here the wizard instructs you to 'say' the answer. Text adventures used to be hard!
jwarren 12y ago
Great fun. Quick pointer though - the convention in IF games is to map X (for eXamine) to look at. Kept tripping me up.
- Sarien 12y ago
  This! And tons of other things that would have been better if this had been made using inform.
  - erikb 12y ago
    Do you mean the tool that can be found on inform7.com? That looks really, really painful to write in.
    - jwarren 12y ago
      It's actually pretty cool to play with. I don't know how much fun writing a whole complex game would be, but I was very impressed with it's syntax.
onmydesk 12y ago
Blurry text is worse than the real life equivalent! Sorry can't play it, makes my eyes go funny. Can you turn that text blur off or down?
- RBerenguel 12y ago
  I opened dev tools and deactivated the text-shadow property in .terminal-window (also found the blur horrible.) Edit: Hmm, after playing a little, the shadow is in more places... Already did too much js and css (and go) today to bother, so leaving it for tomorrow.
- king_magic 12y ago
  I completely agree, it started giving me a headache almost immediately. Won't come back until the blurry text is gone.
fsiefken 12y ago
how was this made? is the z-code available? I know there is a parchment javascript library where you can run z-code in the browser.
- danielweber 12y ago
  This really doesn't feel like z-code. It's an extremely simple (probably home-built[1] parser), not as good as z-code's. [1] Not that home-built is bad. Building your own for fun (and making all the old mistakes) is exactly in the spirit of HN for a side project.
slipstream- 12y ago
The ancient cloud guru URL thing.. a proxy here in the way stripped out the answer, I had to curl through tor. go figure. edit: just finished. I laughed at some bits, all in all I enjoyed it. I facepalmed when I realised I needed chmod (which I had to look at jsbeautified app.js to get the hint - I was trying su/sudo!).
danielweber 12y ago
help Totally stuck on the Javascript declaration. Tried eval and call and apply EDIT Oh, I'm expected to "cheat." Cute. :) question Looking at the source, how does the solution to the robot puzzle actually get activated? EDIT Oh, it's a direct string comparison. Okay. bug If I try to get the man, I'm told "You can't see no man here" bug I can't cut-and-paste the hashed password. That sucks. bug "disintigrates" bug I can't cut-and-paste the ascii code. There is no way I am typing all that in by eye. bugfix If I highlight the code and then right-click before letting go of the mouse I can copy
- slipstream- 12y ago
  I copied it from the chrome dev tools.
- JoshTriplett 12y ago
  > bug I can't cut-and-paste the hashed password. That sucks. > bug I can't cut-and-paste the ascii code. There is no way I am typing all that in by eye. > bugfix If I highlight the code and then right-click before letting go of the mouse I can copy Selecting the text also makes it available for middle-click paste on Linux/UNIX platforms. You can also hit Ctrl-C before releasing the mouse button. But yes, text selection ought to work normally.
erikb 12y ago
Did anybody really understand how to do the javascript thing? Up to now I've only read about people cheating. edit: /SPOILER literally the moment I clicked "send" on this comment I thought about using the console to execute some javascript... welll.

39 points by badbanana 12y ago

If you wish to give feedback or ask questions; please go ahead. I and a workmate did this at a work-related hackathon a couple weeks ago.

willvarfar 12y ago
One fun idea for you is to theme it as an IDE and code rather than a classic terminal text adventure? I tried it for an LD a while back but http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/The-Small-world-of-Professor-Strange_2.jpg http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Th... didn't really get the text itself to look like code from a squint test, nor get syntax completion finished in time.
- badbanana 12y ago
  That's actually a super cool idea for a developer themed text game. Was it a web based game and is it still playable somewhere?
  - willvarfar 12y ago
    http://williame.github.io/ludum_dare_23_tiny_world/ http://williame.github.io/ludum_dare_23_tiny_world/ I've since been shown a nice IRSSI theme too: http://irssi.org/themefiles/c0ders.png http://irssi.org/themefiles/c0ders.png
xtrumanx 12y ago
The aesthetics does not make for easy reading. Never was interested in text adventures in the first place but the blurriness made me quit the game faster than I would have.
- badbanana 12y ago
  Yeah you're not the only one saying that. I guess text games aren't what the kids want these days :) There should probably be a switch to turn off the bad screen effects.
mkesper 12y ago
I really hate green on black and would like to read in positive mode (black on white).
teh_klev 12y ago
Nice idea, but can you allow folks to turn off the fake flickering/display faults. It's hugely distracting. Also the CGA style font is kinda hard to read, perhaps you could allow folks to: - change the font - adjust the brightness and contrast Back in the day when I was a mini-computer engineer our terminal screens were much nicer and crisp.
zyx321 12y ago
Well, my first instinct on the design puzzle was something among the lines of http://xkcd.com/149/ http://xkcd.com/149/ I was a little surprised to get a "no such command" error, especially after finding out the actual solution...
michaelmior 12y ago
Thanks! That was some nice entertainment for the morning :)
isxek 12y ago
I had originally submitted this a few days ago (see: http://imgur.com/uCRZuU4 http://imgur.com/uCRZuU4), after learning about it from a game-related site (http://www.gnomeslair.com/2014/06/avaus-text-adventure-so-you-wish-to.html http://www.gnomeslair.com/2014/06/avaus-text-adventure-so-yo...). Never made it to the front page at all. I'm glad it did, eventually. Should I stick a "Show HN" the next time I find something? I'm hesitant to do so since I wasn't the one who wrote it.

JoshTriplett 12y ago

Slightly sad to see that "ask man about emacs" didn't work. I was pretty amused by the "Don't know anything about that" when queried about "open source", though. "look at tunnel" should work after opening the tunnel. I love the background changes. Why does "get container" not work? The response didn't give a reason. "Welcome to the developer console; you were kind of expected." made me laugh. ...why can I deploy the beard? The music at the end was unexpected.

badbanana 12y ago
Time constraints kept us from fleshing out all characters and descriptions. "get container" should give some feedback that you're not able to pick it up, so that'd be a bug then. Deploying the unix beard was a bug initially, but I left it in because I thought it was kind of funny.
- JoshTriplett 12y ago
  > "get container" should give some feedback that you're not able to pick it up, so that'd be a bug then. It said I couldn't pick it up; it didn't describe, in-character, why.

icemelt8 12y ago

How to enter the convention

badbanana 12y ago
The guy in the beginning looked like the kind of guy who'd be able to enter. Now if you only had similar facial hair somehow..
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
xerophtye 12y ago
Tip: "a Unix beard" is not a description of the bearded man. its another item on the list of things you see

pbjorklund 12y ago

Man, that took me back to a simpler time. I for one loved the green on black. But thats probably because I actually used green on black terminals back in my youth... Gj Carl-Petter and Juha!

gregchapple 12y ago

This is just a pet peeve of mine. I don't understand why you ask "Are you sure you want to leave this page" when I click back, or try to close the tab. I am sure - that's why I tried to leave. edit: fixed typo

danielweber 12y ago
Because someone accidentally closing the window would lose all game state.

Udo 12y ago

I absolutely love it. For the last LD I did a terminal-style game too, but it wasn't nearly as good. Forces the solution. You may need to use this if it fails without it. What's that Unix command line switch déjà vu I'm having there...

chingjun 12y ago

Yeah, a developer cannot get "design".

christudor 12y ago

I love this: found a few interesting tools on the internet as I went through it, which was a nice bonus.

pepijndevos 12y ago

Is it normal for text adventures you just have to try random stuff? I had no clue how to get design. I thought I had missed a clue from the developer maybe. Turned out I just needed to enter a command that was not introduced before, or listed in the help page.

myhf 12y ago
It was normal 30 years ago, as a cheap way to cut development time and pad play time. Parser technology and usability expectations have improved since then, but this piece is too committed to its retro aesthetic to care.
michaelmior 12y ago
The message when you try to get the design is a pretty big clue.
moconnor 12y ago
The source is also its own clue; just search for the error message and read the source around it. That's a strategy that works with many error messages in many programs, not just in this game.

imdsm 12y ago

I tried to `ask richard stallman about gnu`, among other things, but it wouldn't work. Also, I'd stop the blurring effect after a while, that really grated on me. I'd love to have time to try it properly.

shreyas_310 12y ago
Just ask man

tdicola 12y ago

Awesome, nice work! I love the retro CRT look. For folks that haven't played text adventures in a long time, check out the annual interactive fiction competition winners for some great modern ones: http://www.ifcomp.org http://www.ifcomp.org. They're meant to be played in about an hour, have hints, and usually don't rely on cheap deaths or other frustrating tropes of old games.

jariz 12y ago

How do I get past the wizard? I said 'neverdeployonfriday' but it's not working :(

shreyas_310 12y ago
I'm stuck there too...help!
mp4box 12y ago
try "say neverdeployonfriday"
- markild 12y ago
  Ah.. Help text should really be updated.
  - ronaldx 12y ago
    It's traditional in text adventures that you infer un-helped verbs from the text (that is, if the verb is clued at all): here the wizard instructs you to 'say' the answer. Text adventures used to be hard!

jwarren 12y ago

Great fun. Quick pointer though - the convention in IF games is to map X (for eXamine) to look at. Kept tripping me up.

Sarien 12y ago
This! And tons of other things that would have been better if this had been made using inform.
- erikb 12y ago
  Do you mean the tool that can be found on inform7.com? That looks really, really painful to write in.
  - jwarren 12y ago
    It's actually pretty cool to play with. I don't know how much fun writing a whole complex game would be, but I was very impressed with it's syntax.

onmydesk 12y ago

Blurry text is worse than the real life equivalent! Sorry can't play it, makes my eyes go funny. Can you turn that text blur off or down?

RBerenguel 12y ago
I opened dev tools and deactivated the text-shadow property in .terminal-window (also found the blur horrible.) Edit: Hmm, after playing a little, the shadow is in more places... Already did too much js and css (and go) today to bother, so leaving it for tomorrow.
king_magic 12y ago
I completely agree, it started giving me a headache almost immediately. Won't come back until the blurry text is gone.

fsiefken 12y ago

how was this made? is the z-code available? I know there is a parchment javascript library where you can run z-code in the browser.

danielweber 12y ago
This really doesn't feel like z-code. It's an extremely simple (probably home-built[1] parser), not as good as z-code's. [1] Not that home-built is bad. Building your own for fun (and making all the old mistakes) is exactly in the spirit of HN for a side project.

slipstream- 12y ago

The ancient cloud guru URL thing.. a proxy here in the way stripped out the answer, I had to curl through tor. go figure. edit: just finished. I laughed at some bits, all in all I enjoyed it. I facepalmed when I realised I needed chmod (which I had to look at jsbeautified app.js to get the hint - I was trying su/sudo!).

danielweber 12y ago

help Totally stuck on the Javascript declaration. Tried eval and call and apply EDIT Oh, I'm expected to "cheat." Cute. :) question Looking at the source, how does the solution to the robot puzzle actually get activated? EDIT Oh, it's a direct string comparison. Okay. bug If I try to get the man, I'm told "You can't see no man here" bug I can't cut-and-paste the hashed password. That sucks. bug "disintigrates" bug I can't cut-and-paste the ascii code. There is no way I am typing all that in by eye. bugfix If I highlight the code and then right-click before letting go of the mouse I can copy

slipstream- 12y ago
I copied it from the chrome dev tools.
JoshTriplett 12y ago
> bug I can't cut-and-paste the hashed password. That sucks. > bug I can't cut-and-paste the ascii code. There is no way I am typing all that in by eye. > bugfix If I highlight the code and then right-click before letting go of the mouse I can copy Selecting the text also makes it available for middle-click paste on Linux/UNIX platforms. You can also hit Ctrl-C before releasing the mouse button. But yes, text selection ought to work normally.

erikb 12y ago

Did anybody really understand how to do the javascript thing? Up to now I've only read about people cheating. edit: /SPOILER literally the moment I clicked "send" on this comment I thought about using the console to execute some javascript... welll.