The entrance to a small personal site

by dbrereton • 4 years ago

149 31 4 years ago

kderbyma• 4 years ago

awesome - was thinking of doing something similar but for an ARG

c22• 4 years ago

I did this for a website once, but I just ran it on port 23 (telnet). The "game" version had all the same information and functionality as the more mainstream-designed www site on the same host. It ran for 4 years though and not once was it found or used by a real human as far as I can tell. Made me feel like the internet was really dead. I first discovered MUDs as a child while portscanning for open SMTP servers so I could send spoofed email to my friends. It really did used to be a different experience using the net.

vmception• 4 years ago

I first discovered MUDs as a child while portscanning for open SMTP servers so I could send spoofed email to my friends

a growing set of Gen Alpha kids are doing the same in "metaverse"-branded online worlds, but earning a little crypto here and there from whatever they launch or interact with and use it to buy knockoff jpeg apes

maybe a lot of things make more sense with that knowledge, not a lot of people understand whats going on yet, but probably the same distribution of people that figured out children with computers were portscanning in whatever decade that was

astoor• 4 years ago

Good analogy - portscanning and email spoofing was considered a relatively benign issue decades ago, but would be quite serious now and does lead to jail time, and I'm sure the same will be true with cryptocurrencies (unless you're in a failed state where the rule of law is a bug not a feature).

softwarebeware2• 4 years ago

a growing set of Gen Alpha kids are doing the same in "metaverse"-branded online worlds, but earning a little crypto here and there from whatever they launch or interact with and use it to buy knockoff jpeg apes

We really are approaching "Snow Crash" in real life

mrintellectual• 4 years ago

Reminds me of a text-based MMO called Alter Aeon (http://www.alteraeon.com).

escapedmoose• 4 years ago

Oh this is lovely. I forgot how much fun text-based adventures are.

ChrisMarshallNY• 4 years ago

Well played, sir. Well played.

luc_• 4 years ago

I wish I could try `get flask`.

totetsu• 4 years ago

I think the syntax is 'get ye flask'

bitwize• 4 years ago

You can't get ye flask.

abathur5• 4 years ago

This thing is my fault, if anyone has questions/nits/etc.

The usual one is whether the code is somewhere. The short term answer is no, but I did pick out a name and set up a repo for anyone interested to watch, if I ever get to that point: https://github.com/abathur/roomstead

actually_a_dog• 4 years ago

All in all, I like it.

Gameplay is missing a few niceties that you see in slightly more sophisticated games (but, I see you listed LPC as a programming language, so I assume you know that). For instance, if the visible exits are north and south, I can't 'go north'. Instead, I just have to enter 'north' as a command. Likewise, I can't 'look at' a thing; it's just 'look <thing>'. It'd also be great to be able to 'take', 'get', and 'drop' certain things.

On the plus side, I like what happens when you do 'report bug'. At one time, I also considered making a resume kind of like this, except my idea was to embed it as JS code inside a PDF document. The PDF version of the resume doesn't look very good, though. It has a mostly blank first page with just a title, header, and footer when I 'print' it on my machine.

abathur5• 4 years ago

Interesting concept, re: embedding it in a PDF.

Yes, the mechanics/mudlib are a bit sparse. It's stacked on top of a ~terminal JS library, but all of the ~MUD behavior is hand-rolled. It's a bit LP/LD-family-esque, but I've tried to completely exclude as many concepts (health, heartbeats, resets, classes, etc.) as I can get away with.

(Though, if I abstract out and publish the ~game/mudlib layers at some point, I don't think I'd be opposed to it accumulating some features beyond my own golden path.)

Jaruzel• 4 years ago

Bug Report: On Chrome on Windows (on my PC at least) it auto scrolls up a bit too far, cropping off the top line slightly.

abathur5• 4 years ago

Thanks for the reminder. I noticed this on Chrome on Android myself recently, but I didn't have the energy to pull on the thread at the time.

phkahler• 4 years ago

"read" should be available in addition to "look"

abathur5• 4 years ago

"read" is already used in the blog-post rooms and in a few other places for narrower interactions. It does support "glance" as a synonym for "look".

softwarebeware2• 4 years ago

Are you aware of https://ifcomp.org/

abathur5• 4 years ago

Hmm. I don't think so. Not consciously, at least. The site feels a bit familiar, and I would probably click on a link to it if I stumbled on it elsewhere, so I may have at least seen it.

memalign2• 4 years ago

If you like this, you might also enjoy this (mobile)web friendly text game I made a while back: Dungeon Memalign[0]

[0] https://memalign.github.io/m/dungeon/index.html

Tijdreiziger• 4 years ago

Fun game! I actually liked it so much that I submitted it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30866681

The map gets a bit hard to read for the 3-emoji rooms, though. Screenshot (spoilers!): https://i.imgur.com/4yDGeN8.png

I also nearly lost because I didn't go back after getting the gold key, but that might be on me, haha.

memalign2• 4 years ago

Thank you :)

Yeah, I didn’t realize at the time that up-to-date emoji support wasn’t universal, even on the latest OS versions. The “extra” emoji are a result of your system not yet supporting some of the symbols used.

I chose emoji more carefully in my next game, a demo of the excellent interactive fiction game Counterfeit Monkey originally by Emily Short:

https://memalign.github.io/m/counterfeitmonkey/index.html

And a more jokey game of Pac-Man:

https://memalign.github.io/m/pacmandungeon/index.html

alephnan• 4 years ago

Reminds me of the promotion site for The Batman where you solve Riddler riddles.

Just checked it out again, but apparently it's been seized by Gotham police

https://www.rataalada.com/

nathias• 4 years ago

very nice

egberts1• 4 years ago

Where are the orcs?

shantnutiwari• 4 years ago

I have a small game to enter my site too, though mine is Twine based:

https://shantnutiwari.com/

mittermayr• 4 years ago

I sometimes wish text adventures would still have a bit more prominence today. It's nice to see games at super-high fidelity, but these old-fashioned text adventures are so "easy" to make, they're a fantastic way to get into programming as a hobby. As a kid, learning to code was reasonably easy because it was fun; I could make games for my family and friends, and at the time I started, not much was required other than access to a pirated disk of Turbo Pascal or Q-Basic.

I remember when Mode 13h took over and things got a lot more complicated (and also fun, for those who could work it all out). Once I had mastered Mode 13h, a whole new world opened but I wondered how someone could dive into programming if that was the first hill to climb.

And then the demo scene hit me, along with hacky but exciting 3D-2D projections, from plasmas and fractals to Voxel graphics (Commanche!), and that eventually required even more complicated maths that threw me out of the game-making. I remember at the time that I couldn't wait to "grow up" and reach a stage in school where they'd teach me the maths necessary to keep up with the requirements of game design at the time. I never returned to it, unfortunately.

Text adventures were a fantastic and light-weight way into all of it. Every time I try to convince a kid to try and make one, they struggle to get excited about it. They want to make Minecraft and Fortnite, and I don't even know where to begin to explain. So, yeah. Time to learn Unity.

For anyone curious to travel back in time over Christmas or so, here's a bit about Mode 13h: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_13h

And here's a nice book on Game Design of that era, around the infamous Wolfenstein 3D: https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbwolf3d.pdf

depingus• 4 years ago

I sometimes wish text adventures would still have a bit more prominence today.

Text adventures are still alive. Its just called Interactive Fiction now. There's also a whole bunch of modern (often open source) tools available to create them.

Competitions: https://ifcomp.org/comp/2021

IFDB: https://ifdb.org/

Tools: https://itsfoss.com/create-interactive-fiction/

tcspence• 4 years ago

Crap I was eaten by a grue

The entrance to a small personal site

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