Colossal Cue Adventure: a Zork-style text-based programming adventure game

http://adventure.cueup.com/

by rwalker • 14 years ago

88 41 14 years ago

adventure.cueup.com

rwalker7• 14 years ago

We figured this would be good for some Friday fun! Admittedly, a few of the problems are solvable by hand, and we wish there were more jokes about gnus, but overall we just hope you enjoy playing as much as we enjoyed building it.

vq3• 14 years ago

I haven't gotten far into the game yet, but so far I really wished that you had followed the text-adventure idioms better, the interface feels really clunky for someone who is used to playing text-adventures.

Feel free to call me a youngster that is spoiled by modern games if you want.

rwalker7• 14 years ago

If you have any specific idioms you think we should add, let me know here or at robbyw@cueup.com

kordless2• 14 years ago

I built a terminal shell like this a while back. Nice to see you have a history for the input box. Have you seen terminal.js?

rwalker7• 14 years ago

Google seems to resolve several different things as "terminal.js" - which do you mean?

Or, a shorter answer to your question: no. :)

ragmondo• 14 years ago

Hey there ! Congrats for getting it done. I'm sure you've probably thought about this already - but have you considered wiring it up to google talk or a few other IMs ? That way people can play it a bit more easily on their phone etc etc.

pc• 14 years ago

This is really cool.

JoshTriplett3• 14 years ago

Very nice! I like the RNG puzzle you started off with. This reminds me of the Python Challenge, but inspired more by HAKMEM than by exercising random Python library code.

A couple of minor issues I tripped over due to experience with other text adventures:

- Consider adding the standard text adventure shortcut commands: "x" or "examine" for "look at", and "i" for "inventory".

- I found it surprising that "look at inventory_item" didn't work. "look at boat" or "look at vest", for instance.

- How about "help command" for each command listed in the "help" output?

rwalker7• 14 years ago

Deploying these fixes now - thanks for the feedback!

JoshTriplett3• 14 years ago

Thanks for the rapid response! All of those changes work perfectly here, and the interface feels much more comfortable now.

I kinda expected "x chips" and "x radionuclides" to do something, at least as a joke. (Out of curiosity, did you get some inspiration from "no tea" there?)

Also, how about "x me", "talk to me", and "help help"?

Any way you could provide scrollback?

drusenko• 14 years ago

hah, love this! pretty clear you guys spent a ton of time on it, was loads of fun. definitely one-upping ours ;)

kordless2• 14 years ago

> They fail to reach consensus on what it means to `pwd` a pig, then as one, they fall silent.

Clearly this version doesn't have pig paths.

ctangney• 14 years ago

That was fun - thanks Robby and team!

gnosis• 14 years ago

Is there a standalone, open-source version of this available?

rwalker7• 14 years ago

Not at the moment, but with enough interest, it's something we could do at some point.

vq3• 14 years ago

A Z-machine file would be nice. :)

drudru11• 14 years ago

I definitely bookmarked this. This is going to be a fun diversion in my spare time.

nitinrao• 14 years ago

It is a pretty neat game. I have no idea what MTH$RANDOM is.Can you suggest some links where could i look it up?

mindcrime• 14 years ago

https://www.google.com/search?q=mth%24random ??

sswezey• 14 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_congruential_generator

Unfortunately, I can't get the numbers to fit, even with accounting for 00, and using an actual roulette board order.

dsr_2• 14 years ago

Roulette board order doesn't matter. It's calling the RNG sequence.

My mistake was feeding the mod 36 output back in as the next seed; it's the output from the RNG itself, and a good thing too...

pjscott2• 14 years ago

The best reference that Google turned up, IMHO, was the info page for the GNU Scientific Library's random number generators, which has MTH$RANDOM under the name gsl_rng_vax():

http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/manual/html_node/Other-rando...

Of course, that info page can't tell you what seed the VAX in the game is using....

lake99• 14 years ago

Can I take a ^ from the ^ shack?

zx2c42• 14 years ago

Return to Zork, the first graphical non-text based Zork, is the most memorable computer game I've ever played. It was the first time I saw computer graphics so beautiful in such a haunting mysterious world. Sometimes I still have dreams about it, and occasionally during world travels I'll see something that reminds me, "oh I was at a place that looked just like this before... in Zork!"

RTZ was even better than Myst, its cultural successor.

I realized, a few months ago, that Rebecca Snoot from RTZ is Rayanne Graff from My So-Called Life. WHAT? Yes, it's true.

You are in front of a white house...

Pick up rock, throw it at vulture...

Remember to dig up the bonding plant -- if you cut it, you won't be able to get into the comedy club by the cliffs of desperation later on.

Want some rye? Course ya do!

It's now been 20 years since that game came out. Woah. Two decades. 1993. It's still vividly seared into my mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Zork

If you can find an ISO of it, it'll run in DOSBox, I believe. Beware, though, that you need the encyclopedia that comes with the box -- awesome primitive copy protection.

Great game, good times. Any other RTZ nostalgites here?

cowpewter• 14 years ago

Oh man. The phrase "Want some rye? Course ya do!" is one of those phrases that is burned into my brain. It is now a fundamental part of my brain's structure. Anytime I hear something even remotely similar, my brain just automatically pulls it up, complete with memetic mutation. Did someone bake a pie? "Want some pie? Course ya do!"

I still have my original copy in my closet somewhere. I should set DOSBox up and see if I can make it go.

ericclemmons• 14 years ago

I dish out upvotes sparingly, and you just earned one my friend!

That was one of he first games I played on my super-computer (200Mhz) back in the day (along with King's Quest VI)!

The intro music was fantastic, and the live-action videos made the graphics even better.

I had my girlfriend (now wife) follow a guide and talk me through the entire game so she could experience it. The "want some rye?" line is stuck in her weekly-quotes, too!

olgeni• 14 years ago

"Here's to us!"

zx2c42• 14 years ago

Who's like us? Damnnnn few! And we're allll dead.

Cogito• 14 years ago

We didn't have many games on our first computer, but Zork was one of them.

For some reason none of us could get past the swamp at the witch's house. I was 5 or 6 at the time so I don't blame myself, but when I figured out how to run it via DOSBox I was very very careful to poke everything with my walking stick (or whatever it was).

strags• 14 years ago

That was a nice diversion for a Friday afternoon - thanks. I finished the bonus round, but didn't find any pig jokes or easter eggs.

GauntletWizard• 14 years ago

Good game! I enjoyed the first puzzle most, mainly because the second was a pain to write and I didn't think to allow backtracking in the second. I'm stuck, though, on the bonus puzzle; Is there a hint I'm missing? Brute-force doesn't seem a sensible answer.

roryokane• 14 years ago

Here is the puzzle-solving code that I wrote as I played: https://gist.github.com/4571643. It’s written in Ruby 1.9. You can check it out if you’re stuck or just curious.

curiousdannii2• 14 years ago

A popup preventing me from closing the page? Seriously? In 2013?

Pitarou• 14 years ago

HINTS

First puzzle: You might think you have to do an exhaustive search of all possible seeds for the random number generator, but it turns out they've made it easy for you. The initial seed is at one extreme end of the possible range....

Second puzzle: Just create a stack, and walk through the string pushing and popping as you go.

By the way, I'm sure there's a mistake in there. I got the answer x (and I checked it by hand) but it only accepts the answer x - 1.

Third puzzle: My approach used dynamic programming algorithms. If you're unfamiliar with this technique, you'll probably want to find a different way to solve it.

First, I used dynamic programming to find all routes of the form (north|east)+ (i.e. all routes in which the rabbit only goes north and east). That didn't work, but it was clear that the rabbit could only double back on itself a limited number of times, so I extended my code to find all routes of the form (north|east)+((south|west)+(north|east)+)

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dsr_2• 14 years ago

vim and emacs both know all about matching arbitrarily nested parentheticals...

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Colossal Cue Adventure: a Zork-style text-based programming adventure game

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