Here is issue #4 of ">REMEMBER"! Today's
article is a tutorial, for the first time, but not the last!
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My news
I was busy this month with the release of Light,
a sci-fi visual novel for mobile, which I talked about a bit all the
way back in Issue #2. I'm also writing another project for the same
company; it's very nice to be able to make some money writing narrative
games!
The translation of Tristam Island is still underway, and the
text of the game is almost done; this had the beneficial side-effect of
having me read the game's text line by line, which led me to find a
couple of typos and mistakes. Release 3, along with the French
translation, will probably come out in late April or early May (I still
need to translate the parser, which is no small feat, and some
accent-related stuff of course).
In the meantime, full reviews of Tristam Island are appearing
in all sorts of magazines, and I couldn't be happier! The game has
appeared, or is slated to appear, in "Zzap! 64", "Crash Magazine",
"Juiced.GS", "Al's Spectrum Annual", "Amiga Future", and more! Overall,
the reviews have been very positive, which I'm obviously quite proud of.
Can't wait for the physical release, some time this year!
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Last month's issue
The response to the article in Issue #3, on women's contributions to the
text adventure genre, was bigger than ever! I heard from a lot of
people, both replying to this newsletter and talking to me on Twitter.
I'm quite pleased with it! If you're interested, here's some further
reading on this: Gareth Pitchford listed a great number of women who contributed to the British 80s scene, and an account related to the Spanish-speaking IF scene had a whole Twitter thread highlighting women's contributions to that scene. Thank you all for the discussion, I learned a lot of things!
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Community news
Quite a few things have happened this month:
- In the last couple of editions, I somehow forgot to tell you about Aaron A. Reed's newsletter, "50 years of text games",
which is a very interesting read! Every week corresponds to a year, and
Aaron picks a text-based game (including interactive fiction but also
gamebooks, ARGs, and The Oregon Trail) published that year and writes an
in-depth article about it. There is ton of research behind it, and even
seasoned adventurers will discover something new on Adventure (1976) or Scott Adams games (1978). Highly recommended reading!
- Hot on the heels of their Christmas jam, Adventuron is organizing a new game jam,
under the umbrella of the "Text Adventure Literacy Project". You have
about 20 days to make a text adventure with a "VERB NOUN" parser that
would be suitable for young ones; the idea is to help younger players
learn how to play a text adventure and discover this great genre. There
are several prizes, and Scott Adams himself is involved! Huge kudos to
the folks at Adventuron for organizing this jam.
- Torbjörn
Andersson has been taking a look at "Mini-Zork II", an unreleased
Infocom game which aimed to give a taste of "Zork II" on a C64 cassette.
The game was recovered when the so-called Infocom files were uploaded
on Github, and Torbjörn fixed a few bugs. Work is underway on his Github.
- Remember
">REMEMBER" (ha) Issue #2, on text compression with Infocom's tools?
Work on the problem of determining good abbreviations is still underway
(it's really not easy to find the best algorithm!), and I really need
to update my tool to enjoy these algorithmic advances. But this work had
a very cool payoff this month! Thanks to Matthew Russotto's algorithm
and Henrik Asman's help for code cleanup, Torbjörn was able to compress
the size of "Mini-Zork II" enough that it can indeed be played on a C64 cassette
on Fredrik Ramsberg and Johan Berntsson's Ozmoo interpreter! My
understanding is that Torbjörn wants the eventual final version to fit
on a C64 cassette, just like Infocom's game would have. Congratulations
to all!
- Andrew Plotkin had a very interesting article
on the topic of unwinnability in adventure games, challenging some
conventional wisdom about Infocom games, and reflecting on the evolution
of the design of adventure games through the ages.
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Article of the month
In today's article, I'm showing you a really easy and visual way to make
a text-based adventure (like a computerized "Choose your Own
Adventure"-style book) for your favorite retro platform. Mind you, not a
text adventure with a parser, like the ones we've been talking about;
so this might be considered slightly out of scope for this newsletter,
but I'm assume it'll still be interesting to you. After all, I'd wager
you've all tried to make this kind of game when you were first
discovering BASIC 🙂
The tutorial can be done under an hour, and is accessible enough that
children could try their hand at it! It involves a really cool and
visual new tool that you probably haven't heard about before, and
Infocom's Z-Machine. The result is compact, fast, and portable; what
more could you want? Dive in!
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See you soon!
Thank you for your continued support! Please share the word if this
newsletter has been interesting to you, and tell your friends to
subscribe - past issues can be read in a browser, too! Thank you, and
see you next month!
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