Artic Adventure A - Planet of Death

[EdwardianDuck]

This was discussed in episode 2 of the Retro Adventurers Podcast. As I have fond memories of this game and had time on my hands, I've been porting this to Inform6/PunyInform, mostly for my own amusement (and, yes, I know there's no real point).

I have it mostly roughed out and I've been trying to modernise it a bit, mostly to deal with the under implemented bits and things which don't seem to make a lot of sense. So, yes, I'm mucking about with it. I've been trying to come up with plausible reasons for why, for example, DANCE allows you to pass the force field.

For example, in the original typing GO LAKE when beside the lake and wearing the boots just returns you to the prompt with no message. But you have somehow obtained a gold coin. I've changed this so that the lake is actually a location and when in the lake you can see the coin and take it. That seems to make more sense to me.

Another example, you can use the VINE/ROPE to climb down the deep pit, presumably having tied it to something. But you can't climb back up.

There's quite a lot of this sort of under implementation to fix (or ignore, depending on how you feel about this sort of thing).

Also, there are bugs in some versions.

Personally, I think the end game isn't great, especially the fact that your space ship seems to need a starter motor. Not fitted, just present. I don't know about anyone else, but a starter motor feels more Ford Cortina than space ship to me.

I've made much use of Jim Gerrie's MC-10 BASIC version as a reference for how things work, my own solution & map from the late 1990s and a walkthrough from CASA.

Still a work in progress, so I'm not sure if/when it will be good enough to post here.

Any thoughts?

Jeremy

[EdwardianDuck]

Very rough beta 1 attached (.SSD & .Z3). There may be bugs and divergent behaviour from the original arising from my mistakes and what looks to me to be very under implemented things in the original. Some of these seem to lead to inconsistencies and odd emergent behaviour (is that the right term?) but it wasn't easy to guess at the original intention in some cases.

The puzzles are basically the same, as are the objects and locations. Some things which were mentioned but not implemented have now been implemented, if not in great detail. It's been enhanced/tarted up/mucked about with in an attempt to modernise it a bit and to make it less terse. It probably still doesn't make a huge amount of sense as a story. It's still very murder-heavy and easy to soft lock as I didn't want to change the game fundamentals. There's more to examine and hopefully better explanations why things happen. I haven't changed most of the stock library responses at this stage, so you'll get a few of those.

Note that this game has a random chance of killing you in some rooms/circumstances. You can literally walk into a room and get immediately killed.

Also, showing its age, the solution uses the USE verb to use objects. While I don't much like this, I've retained it just to avoid changing the game too much.

I make no claim that any of this is a good idea.

For comparison, the .Z3 is ~38Kb from ~1,430 lines of Inform6 code (excluding blank lines and comments) whereas the Spectrum version was ~9Kb and the ZX81 version ~13Kb (I think).

The .SSD doesn't use the latest Ozmoo, it's just whatever I had installed.

If anyone actually plays this, please provide feedback and bug reports here (or by PM if you're shy). Use ROT13 if you don't want to spoil a 1981 game .

Jeremy

[SteveF]

Personally, I think the end game isn't great, especially the fact that your space ship seems to need a starter motor. Not fitted, just present. I don't know about anyone else, but a starter motor feels more Ford Cortina than space ship to me.

Yes, it kind of does now you mention it. It's probably more of a change than you'd want to make, but could you replace the starter motor with some kind of sci-fi handwavium gadget like a "plasma field initiator" or "tachyon concentrator"? Which, errm, you need to help the engine start until the fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining...

Edit: In terms of feedback, I've played a handful of moves and I notice that if you do "examine ravine" when you're beside the lake it says it doesn't understand what ravine means. This is pretty much par for the course I think, but it might be nicer if it said something like "you see nothing special about the ravine". "examine lake" has the same not-really-an-issue.

[EdwardianDuck]

Yes, it's pretty rough around the edges at the moment. The plan is to go through it again next weekend and fix this sort of thing. I'm unlikely to have the time or energy before then.

[EdwardianDuck]

Attached is beta 2. I've reviewed all the locations for referenced but unimplemented items and hopefully fixed all the issues I'm aware of. Ideally it needs someone else to work through this and let me know what else I've messed up (particularly given that there are multiple solutions to some puzzles). One can go deep into the rabbit holes with this sort of thing at the risk of massively over-implementing things (see Duck! Me? for example). I've tried to resist doing this so far, but have implemented a few obvious things in a bit more detail.

Note also that it's a .Z5 now. That's just because I've used some code I'd written before, specifically assuming .Z5, so rather than worry about testing it in .Z3, I just decided to switch to .Z5. Also, I'm using latest bleeding edge Acorn Ozmoo for no particular reason.

Thoughts/comments/suggestions?

Jeremy

[SteveF]

NIce one. I have had a very quick wander around the first few locations and it seems much more polished. For what it's worth I found it a bit confusing that both "west" and "down" at the edge of the deep pit kill me, but maybe that's reasonable and/or maybe it's part of the original which you don't want to change.

How hard would it be to allow "undo"? On the Acorn build this would only work if you were running on a co-pro and turned it on at build time, but for such a lethal game this might make it more palatable to modern sensibilities. Of course it may also make things "too easy" - it's just a thought. (FWIW I have no idea how easy supporting undo is in the game itself, but for a Z3 game Ozmoo will support this automatically if you enable it at build time. For Z5 the game needs to handle the undo command itself.) I downloaded and played the Ozmoo version this time, I haven't tried the .z5 version in anything like frotz and I appreciate the game may already support undo.

Thanks for using the latest Ozmoo, it's always good to get extra testing!

[EdwardianDuck]

The west/down thing is part of the original game. I think the idea is that as you are "east of a deep pit" it's somewhat logical that both west and down lead to the actual pit (which doesn't exist in game, you end up in the quiet room). Of course, in a modern game one would not just allow the player to throw themselves into a deep it, you'd prevent them doing that. This is what I've done to implement the cliff in the start location, which is mentioned in the code I worked from, but not implemented.

I'll enable UNDO this evening, at least for .Z5, I wasn't aware it was possible for .Z3. Edit. Oh, that's an Ozmoo 13+ feature. Nice.

Jeremy

[EdwardianDuck]

Beta 3 is attached. Other than having UNDO enabled, it's unchanged from Beta 2.

Jeremy

[SteveF]

Thanks Jeremy, I've given the z5 a quick spin in frotz and the undo saves my neck (literally) with the deep pit.

I appreciate you may have done this deliberately, and for beta-testing it's hardly critical anyway, but note that Acorn Ozmoo will never support undo unless you specify --undo when building the game, and even then undo will only be supported if the player is using a second processor. (--undo has a modest-ish performance penalty, which is why it's not the default and is 2P-only. I suspect for a relatively small and relatively lethal game like this, --undo is a worthwhile tradeoff.)

[EdwardianDuck]

No, that's my mistake. Hopefully the attached has UNDO working.

[SteveF]

Works perfectly, thanks!