A Little Text Adventure.

Edit: Oops appears it is not working in firefox, will have to figure that out.

At last another bit of content on marblemice.com. Yes it is retro, it is a clone of a text adventure from 1984. I decide to knock this up after attempting to make a command line interface in a web page. You can now relive the thrill of playing a text adventure on the web that you once had to type in on a probably coffee stained keyboard. Here is a direct link

Ok, in terms of game play it is not great and falls into to the simple to play text adventure catagory. If you get stuck just do Ctrl-U to look at the source I have not minified it. Browsing the text should tell you all you need to know to solve the game.

I actually quite enjoyed creating the game. I learned a bit more about HTML/CSS/JQuery, threw around five hundred odd lines of code and ended with a ok looking code for my experience level with JavaScript. As there were no graphics in the game all that was required was a bit of imagination (I slightly adapted the original design) and coding skills.

Coding wise I was learning towards a data driven design but for some many specific commands such as give and shoot and well everything to do with the one NPC was coded in place. It was just not worth going the extra mile when there is only one NPC and I seriously doubt I will code up another text adventure.

Having said that I am pondering a "Choose you own adventure", a format that is more suited to the web where devices may not have a keyboard. It would be a nice progression up from a text adventure and this time the adventure would be an original if probably a little derivative in terms of story. Perhaps I will hack together a prototype at some point.

Over the past couple of weeks I have gradually comming to the conclusion that for turn based story driven games  HTML/CSS/JQuery actually provides quite a nice environment to develop them. That is assuming I target Firefox and Chrome. I have no idea how well IE handles the stuff I am making.