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This newsletter is almost one year old -
isn't that wild? 😀 And even better, its subscriber count has grown
every month, and you are now several hundreds to receive my emails every
month! To celebrate the occasion, I am preparing a special #12 issue -
special as in, I am embarking this month on a very neat project that
will take me way more time than usual, and Issue #12's article will be a
tutorial with everything you need to replicate it. You won't want to
miss it! 😉
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My news
I haven't talked about Aaron Reed's 50 years of text games
project in a long while, as the premise of his newsletter is that every
week, a new year is covered, and we have left the realm of retro text
adventures a long while ago. But last month, one of the articles that he
published was very close to my heart: his 2007 article
talked about "The Commonplace Book Project", in particular in the
Spanish-language and French-language communities, and this was actually a
project that I was a part of! 😊 I was just starting out with
Inform 6, and having this community project of several small games to
work on together was a very nice experience. So this isn't a "my news on
retro text adventures" this month, as much as a "my retro news on text
adventures" 🙂
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Community news
Lots to report on this month, but a major news was the death of Clive
Sinclair, inventor extraordinaire who created, among others, the
Spectrum line of computers. They were the most popular microcomputers in
the UK (and Spain, too, no?) in the 1980s, and many British text
adventures were made to run on such computers, so it is major retro text
adventure news indeed...
Other, less sad news this month include:
- Brett Norris has a webpage on The Quill,
featuring an online interpreter that was released this month, but also
lots of technical details, source code analysis, tools, etc. A must if
you are curious about The Quill!
- This Twitter thread involving Neil Parsons and Gareth Pitchford, on Quill adventures written with and by an enthusiastic teacher, is very cool.
- Check out this very neat tutorial on how to make an Adventuron game for Spectrum Next.
- And I guess I had somehow missed that Adventuron games can be exported to DAAD Ready, for a limited number of platforms! And this month, the MSX/MSX2 DAAD interpreter was updated.
- Lastly, I wanted to draw attention to this post by Jason Lautzenheiser
on intfiction.org. Due to health issues, Jason has taken a back seat on
the development of Trizbort, the amazing mapping tool that can, among
other things, auto-map a game from its transcript, or export a map into a
skeleton of a game in whichever language you want. I use it a lot! If
you are interested in helping out the project,
Jason would like to find help to keep development going, as there are
still lots that can be done (including some improvements to the I6
export that would be very helpful to me 😇). Thank you!
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This month's article
The subject for this month's article is an idea I'm very curious about,
but I'm not sure I will ever find the time to do it: "de-makes", as in
remaking a text adventure so it runs on older, more constrained
platforms. I actually started my "career" with 2 such projects, and I
remember they gave me lots of practice and more confidence; I hope the
ideas in the article are taken up by someone!
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See you soon!
Next month is a big month for this newsletter, so I better get back to
it! 😉 Thank you for continuing to spread the word about this
newsletter, it is much appreciated! Take care everyone!
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