Welcome to Gaia! ::

Hey folks.

I'm currently being all reminiscent of my earliest of gaming days, as well as trying to get the hang of this Flash lark, so I'm doing what any right-minded person would do: writing an object-oriented, actionscript-based text-adventure for my Gaia Profile. wink

It's been a really fun project, and both a good way to take my mind off the more tedious programming I'm forced into at work, as well as a learning experience. Plus, writing text-adventures is turning into a lost art - which is a shame, since I really enjoyed them in my youth, and it's great fun to come up with rooms and puzzles and such.

The complete version is now up! It's bound to still contain errors, and I'll work diligently to squish these as they come up. Still, it should be playable. smile


I'm also creating this topic to chronicle my progress on this project.

LAST UPDATED: Wednesday, Aug 30, 5:34PM


Well, I've been featured, and what a ride it's already been. xd

First off, I'd like to apologize to everyone for the trouble everyone had with my profile not loading properly. Thing is, I'm hosting it on my own server, and the moment I was featured about a thousand people starting downloading it within the span of an hour or so. sweatdrop My server just.. couldn't keep up.

Most of you should have it in your cache, by now, and I've increased the amount of bandwidth you're all getting - but I'm still going to look into a paid, dedicated server. Also because I want to start creating a few more things for Gaia and its users.

Hmm.. what else? Well, I had to turn off my friendlist, unfortunately, because I learned that it sorta.. breaks, after a while, under the strain of a thousand requests. whee Likewise, my PMs are set to friend-only.. not my style, but it's a neccesity at this point in time. I hope there's no hard feelings. heart

ADDITION:

I just paid for the domain sphexish.org and a fairly professional hosting package. I've migrated the game over there. I hope this will improve performance for everyone! This will also allow me to provide much better and more reliable hosting for the profiles I plan to build.




Version log:
1.19 - Few more broken exits, and some issues with delayed events overlapping eachother, have been taken care of.
1.18 - Hopefully took care of all the helpful suggestions and bugs discovered by the very meticulous player Alexditto.
1.17 - Fixed a hilarious 'Window of Doom' bug which resulted in the rather unfortunate and premature 'death' of J.Kougar's poor mate! Thanks to the both of them for sniffing it out for me, and giving suggestions over the phone.
1.16 - Going a bit crazy for the big day, streamlining things left and right
1.15 - Fixed the dreaded Infinite Kikis bug(!)
1.14 - First major update: added a puzzle, and fixed a serious bug that could get players hopelessly stuck.
1.04 - Made a few confusing descriptions and actions a bit more logical.
1.03 - Hopefully fixed a few faulty exits
1.02 - Added a few additional keywords
1.01 - Fixed minor output errors


Total days spent: 15
Total code so far: 2185 lines
Total size of exported swf-file so far: 72kb ( heart )

I'm now going to determine what prizes I'm going to give out for the top players. smile I'll prolly post a topic in the contest forum, and link to it here, in a minute.

"I don't wanna be old
and sleep alone.
An empty house
is not a home."
-Keane, 'Atlantic'

Beyond the Door - The FAQ
To honor by deed

NOTE:
When describing commands, things between ()s
are optional, and things between []s indicate
you need to replace it with an object name.



It's a text-adventure, a genre of games that pretty much died when computer graphics and interfaces evolved, and things like point-and-click adventures (Day of the Tentacle, Leisure Suit Larry, Discworld, ...) supplanted them.

They're like single-player MUDs or MUCKs, in that the world of the game is conveyed purely by means of prose, and the player interacts with it by way of typing simple commands in a way similar to a chatroom.



I cannot simply produce a short list, due to the way the game works.

However, there are several basic structures for different kinds of actions. The parser - the coding that tries to interpret your commands - is smart enough to be flexible about how you type out these types of commands, as long as it sees a structure it recognizes.

We'll start with the simple, single-word stuff and move our way up to commands involving more than one object:



The game-world is divided into rooms, which have one or more exits.

At the bottom of the description of each room is the list of available exits. For example: [Exits: west]. That means you can go to another room by typing:


> west




In case it scrolled off-screen, you can look at the current room and its exits again by typing:


> look
> where or
> check




Yep. And that's where we get into the slightly more complex commands:


> look (at) (the) [thingie]
> examine (the) [thingie]
> check (the) [thingie]
> read (the) [thingie]





> grab (the) [thingie]
> take (the) [thingie]
> get (the) [thingie]





> inventory





> drop (the) [thingie]
> throw (the) [thingie]


Note that throwing isn't exactly the equivalent of quietly putting something down. Be careful what you choose to lob about the place, eh?



No, items you drop or throw away will stick around indefinately (unless the game is scripted for them to vanish). You can go to the room you left them in and snag them again.

Thanks guys! biggrin

There's a nice little demo up in my profile right now. Check it out if you want, and, er, try not to kill yourselves. (Yes, it is possible.. had to test it, no?) Also did some really quick styling to give it a moderately appropriate home. Mostly involved killing everything. wink

@Cranial
Hey, thanks! The game itself isn't very graphical, but I do want to dress up the profile page around it a bit more than it is now. sweatdrop And meh.. I'm just doing what I enjoy doing.

If you find any bugs, or have any other ideas/complaints, please let me know people!

That's really neat, I remember seeing a Xanga layout like it once. Very nice.

Really? Including a functional game? sweatdrop



Hahaha, go you! heart It can technically be done in four moves. wink
Anyway, as the first reported victim of my profile, you get 2k.

For your bereaved family and such - you know.

I'm trying to make it a bit more functional, with a wishlist and comments and such. It's a bit too stripped down at the moment.

And, I do know what you mean. They're certainly harder than graphical, point&click adventures. I had a really simple, Dutch-language one as a kid, about exploring Dracula's castle, and I never managed to finish it. sweatdrop I've looked all over for it, in hopes of having another go, but it was too obscure, apparently.

I try to award players who try random crap, though. That's half the fun. wink



(Laughs) Dang. I really thought I'd get away with that omission. Anyway, I'll include it in the recognized command-list once I get home! wink