

Show HN: A text adventure for developers - badbanana
http://www.avausadventure.com

======
onmydesk
Blurry text is worse than the real life equivalent!

Sorry can't play it, makes my eyes go funny. Can you turn that text blur off
or down?

~~~
king_magic
I completely agree, it started giving me a headache almost immediately. Won't
come back until the blurry text is gone.

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JoshTriplett
Slightly sad to see that "ask man about emacs" didn't work. I was pretty
amused by the "Don't know anything about that" when queried about "open
source", though.

"look at tunnel" should work after opening the tunnel.

I love the background changes.

Why does "get container" not work? The response didn't give a reason.

"Welcome to the developer console; you were kind of expected." made me laugh.

...why can I deploy the beard?

The music at the end was unexpected.

~~~
badbanana
Time constraints kept us from fleshing out all characters and descriptions.

"get container" should give some feedback that you're not able to pick it up,
so that'd be a bug then.

Deploying the unix beard was a bug initially, but I left it in because I
thought it was kind of funny.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> "get container" should give some feedback that you're not able to pick it
> up, so that'd be a bug then.

It said I couldn't pick it up; it didn't describe, in-character, _why_.

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pbjorklund
Man, that took me back to a simpler time.

I for one loved the green on black. But thats probably because I actually used
green on black terminals back in my youth...

Gj Carl-Petter and Juha!

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tdicola
Awesome, nice work! I love the retro CRT look.

For folks that haven't played text adventures in a long time, check out the
annual interactive fiction competition winners for some great modern ones:
[http://www.ifcomp.org](http://www.ifcomp.org). They're meant to be played in
about an hour, have hints, and usually don't rely on cheap deaths or other
frustrating tropes of old games.

------
badbanana
If you wish to give feedback or ask questions; please go ahead. I and a
workmate did this at a work-related hackathon a couple weeks ago.

~~~
xtrumanx
The aesthetics does not make for easy reading. Never was interested in text
adventures in the first place but the blurriness made me quit the game faster
than I would have.

~~~
badbanana
Yeah you're not the only one saying that. I guess text games aren't what the
kids want these days :)

There should probably be a switch to turn off the bad screen effects.

------
slipstream-
The ancient cloud guru URL thing.. a proxy here in the way stripped out the
answer, I had to curl through tor. go figure.

edit: just finished. I laughed at some bits, all in all I enjoyed it. I
facepalmed when I realised I needed chmod (which I had to look at jsbeautified
app.js to get the hint - I was trying su/sudo!).

------
danielweber
_help_ Totally stuck on the Javascript declaration. Tried _eval_ and _call_
and _apply_

 _EDIT_ Oh, I'm expected to "cheat." Cute. :)

 _question_ Looking at the source, how does the solution to the robot puzzle
actually get activated?

 _EDIT_ Oh, it's a direct string comparison. Okay.

 _bug_ If I try to get the man, I'm told

"You can't see no man here"

 _bug_ I can't cut-and-paste the hashed password. That sucks.

 _bug_ "disintigrates"

 _bug_ I can't cut-and-paste the ascii code. There is no way I am typing all
that in by eye.

 _bugfix_ If I highlight the code and then right-click before letting go of
the mouse I can copy

~~~
JoshTriplett
> bug I can't cut-and-paste the hashed password. That sucks.

> bug I can't cut-and-paste the ascii code. There is no way I am typing all
> that in by eye.

> bugfix If I highlight the code and then right-click before letting go of the
> mouse I can copy

Selecting the text also makes it available for middle-click paste on
Linux/UNIX platforms. You can also hit Ctrl-C before releasing the mouse
button. But yes, text selection ought to work normally.

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Udo
I absolutely love it. For the last LD I did a terminal-style game too, but it
wasn't nearly as good.

    
    
      Forces the solution. You may need to use this if it fails without it.
    

What's that Unix command line switch déjà vu I'm having there...

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gregchapple
This is just a pet peeve of mine. I don't understand why you ask "Are you sure
you want to leave this page" when I click back, or try to close the tab. I am
sure - that's why I tried to leave.

edit: fixed typo

~~~
danielweber
Because someone accidentally closing the window would lose all game state.

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imdsm
I tried to `ask richard stallman about gnu`, among other things, but it
wouldn't work.

Also, I'd stop the blurring effect after a while, that really grated on me.
I'd love to have time to try it properly.

~~~
shreyas_310
Just ask man

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erikb
Did anybody really understand how to do the javascript thing? Up to now I've
only read about people cheating.

edit:

/SPOILER

literally the moment I clicked "send" on this comment I thought about using
the console to execute some javascript... welll.

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pepijndevos
Is it normal for text adventures you just have to try random stuff?

I had no clue how to get design. I thought I had missed a clue from the
developer maybe. Turned out I just needed to enter a command that was not
introduced before, or listed in the help page.

~~~
myhf
It was normal 30 years ago, as a cheap way to cut development time and pad
play time. Parser technology and usability expectations have improved since
then, but this piece is too committed to its retro aesthetic to care.

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jariz
How do I get past the wizard? I said 'neverdeployonfriday' but it's not
working :(

~~~
mp4box
try "say neverdeployonfriday"

~~~
markild
Ah.. Help text should really be updated.

~~~
ronaldx
It's traditional in text adventures that you infer un-helped verbs from the
text (that is, if the verb is clued at all): here the wizard instructs you to
'say' the answer.

Text adventures used to be hard!

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chingjun
Yeah, a developer cannot get "design".

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jwarren
Great fun. Quick pointer though - the convention in IF games is to map X (for
eXamine) to look at. Kept tripping me up.

~~~
Sarien
This! And tons of other things that would have been better if this had been
made using inform.

~~~
erikb
Do you mean the tool that can be found on inform7.com? That looks really,
really painful to write in.

~~~
jwarren
It's actually pretty cool to play with. I don't know how much fun writing a
whole complex game would be, but I was very impressed with it's syntax.

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christudor
I love this: found a few interesting tools on the internet as I went through
it, which was a nice bonus.

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fsiefken
how was this made? is the z-code available? I know there is a parchment
javascript library where you can run z-code in the browser.

~~~
danielweber
This really doesn't feel like z-code. It's an extremely simple (probably home-
built[1] parser), not as good as z-code's.

[1] Not that home-built is bad. Building your own for fun (and making all the
old mistakes) is exactly in the spirit of HN for a side project.

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icemelt8
How to enter the convention

~~~
badbanana
The guy in the beginning looked like the kind of guy who'd be able to enter.
Now if you only had similar facial hair somehow..

