Dan Q

Tag: choose your own adventure

A Castle Built From Random Rooms

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

A Castle Built From Random Rooms is a work in progress/early access/demo version of a full game that’ll probably never exist. But if it does exist, it will be basically the same as this, but on a grander scale, and include the following features:

   – over a hundred random rooms instead of about ten
   – character jobs and descriptions that actually add individualised effects/skills/starting equipment and so on
   – special pre-chosen characters with particulalrly challenging stats levels for extra difficult challenges
   – more stats! more items! more use of the stats and items within different rooms to create different outcomes!
   – high scores and loot rankings and possibly even achievements of some kind
   – less bugs (aspiration)
   – decent endings (stretch goal)

What the game almost certainly won’t ever have:

   – any semblance of quality or coherence
   – sound and/or music
   – monetary success

I saw and first played this ages ago, after its initial release was mentioned on Metafilter Projects last year. In case you missed it first time around, you can give it a go now!

It’s a Twine-like choose-your-own-adventure, but with the rooms randomly shuffled each time, in sort-of a semi-rougelite way. Some imaginative work in this. And the art style is wonderful!

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A Proper Cup of Tea

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Screenshot from "A Proper Cup of Tea", showing the start of the game.

This “choose your own adventure”-style game about making the perfect cup of tea is just… excellent.

If you lack the imagination to understand how a game like this could have dozens of possible endings, you desperately need to play it. My favourite path so far through the game was to add a teabag, then hot water, then remove the teabag, then add some milk, then add a second teabag, then drink it.

Genuinely can’t stop laughing at this masterpiece.

Repost posted at UTC on .

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Werewolves and Wanderer

This post is also available as a video. If you'd prefer to watch/listen to me talk about this topic, give it a look.

This blog post is also available as a video. Would you prefer to watch/listen to me tell you about the video game that had the biggest impact on my life?

Of all of the videogames I’ve ever played, perhaps the one that’s had the biggest impact on my life1 was: Werewolves and (the) Wanderer.2

This simple text-based adventure was originally written by Tim Hartnell for use in his 1983 book Creating Adventure Games on your Computer. At the time, it was common for computing books and magazines to come with printed copies of program source code which you’d need to re-type on your own computer, printing being significantly many orders of magnitude cheaper than computer media.3

Front cover of The Amazing Amstrad Omnibus, by Martin Fairbanks, with its bright yellow text on a red background.
Werewolves and Wanderer was adapted for the Amstrad CPC4 by Martin Fairbanks and published in The Amazing Amstrad Omnibus (1985), which is where I first discovered it.
When I first came across the source code to Werewolves, I’d already begun my journey into computer programming. This started alongside my mother and later – when her quantity of free time was not able to keep up with my level of enthusiasm – by myself.

I’d been working my way through the operating manual for our microcomputer, trying to understand it all.5

Scan of a ring-bound page from a technical manual. The page describes the use of the "INPUT" command, saying "This command is used to let the computer know that it is expecting something to be typed in, for example, the answer to a question". The page goes on to provide a code example of a program which requests the user's age and then says "you look younger than [age] years old.", substituting in their age. The page then explains how it was the use of a variable that allowed this transaction to occur.
The ring-bound 445-page A4 doorstep of a book quickly became adorned with my pencilled-in notes, the way a microcomputer manual ought to be. It’s strange to recall that there was a time that beginner programmers still needed to be reminded to press [ENTER] at the end of each line.
And even though I’d typed-in dozens of programs before, both larger and smaller, it was Werewolves that finally helped so many key concepts “click” for me.

In particular, I found myself comparing Werewolves to my first attempt at a text-based adventure. Using what little I’d grokked of programming so far, I’d put together a series of passages (blocks of PRINT statements6) with choices (INPUT statements) that sent the player elsewhere in the story (using, of course, the long-considered-harmful GOTO statement), Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style.

Werewolves was… better.

Photograph of Dan in his mid-teens, with shoulder-length bleached-blonde hair and wearing a t-shirt with a picture of a snarling wolf, sits in front of a running PC (with its beige case open) on which an external modem is precariously balanced.
By the time I was the model of a teenage hacker, I’d been writing software for years. Most of it terrible.

Werewolves and Wanderer was my first lesson in how to structure a program.

Let’s take a look at a couple of segments of code that help illustrate what I mean (here’s the full code, if you’re interested): 

10 REM WEREWOLVES AND WANDERER

20 GOSUB 2600:REM INTIALISE
30 GOSUB 160
40 IF RO<>11 THEN 30

50 PEN 1:SOUND 5,100:PRINT:PRINT "YOU'VE DONE IT!!!":GOSUB 3520:SOUND 5,80:PRINT "THAT WAS THE EXIT FROM THE CASTLE!":SOUND 5,200
60 GOSUB 3520
70 PRINT:PRINT "YOU HAVE SUCCEEDED, ";N$;"!":SOUND 5,100
80 PRINT:PRINT "YOU MANAGED TO GET OUT OF THE CASTLE"
90 GOSUB 3520
100 PRINT:PRINT "WELL DONE!"
110 GOSUB 3520:SOUND 5,80
120 PRINT:PRINT "YOUR SCORE IS";
130 PRINT 3*TALLY+5*STRENGTH+2*WEALTH+FOOD+30*MK:FOR J=1 TO 10:SOUND 5,RND*100+10:NEXT J
140 PRINT:PRINT:PRINT:END

...

2600 REM INTIALISE
2610 MODE 1:BORDER 1:INK 0,1:INK 1,24:INK 2,26:INK 3,18:PAPER 0:PEN 2 
2620 RANDOMIZE TIME
2630 WEALTH=75:FOOD=0
2640 STRENGTH=100
2650 TALLY=0
2660 MK=0:REM NO. OF MONSTERS KILLED

...

3510 REM DELAY LOOP
3520 FOR T=1 TO 900:NEXT T
3530 RETURN
Locomotive BASIC had mandatory line numbering. The spacing and gaps (...) have been added for readability/your convenience.

What’s interesting about the code above? Well…

  • The code for “what to do when you win the game” is very near the top. “Winning” is the default state. The rest of the adventure exists to obstruct that. In a language with enforced line numbering and no screen editor7, it makes sense to put fixed-length code at the top… saving space for the adventure to grow below.
  • Two subroutines are called (the GOSUB statements):
    • The first sets up the game state: initialising the screen (2610), the RNG (2620), and player characteristics (2630 – 2660). This also makes it easy to call it again (e.g. if the player is given the option to “start over”). This subroutine goes on to set up the adventure map (more on that later).
    • The second starts on line 160: this is the “main game” logic. After it runs, each time, line 40 checks IF RO<>11 THEN 30. This tests whether the player’s location (RO) is room 11: if so, they’ve exited the castle and won the adventure. Otherwise, flow returns to line 30 and the “main game” subroutine happens again. This broken-out loop improving the readability and maintainability of the code.8
  • A common subroutine is the “delay loop” (line 3520). It just counts to 900! On a known (slow) processor of fixed speed, this is a simpler way to put a delay in than relying on a real-time clock.

The game setup gets more interesting still when it comes to setting up the adventure map. Here’s how it looks: 

2680 REM SET UP CASTLE
2690 DIM A(19,7):CHECKSUM=0
2700 FOR B=1 TO 19
2710   FOR C=1 TO 7
2720     READ A(B,C):CHECKSUM=CHECKSUM+A(B,C)
2730   NEXT C:NEXT B
2740 IF CHECKSUM<>355 THEN PRINT "ERROR IN ROOM DATA":END

...

2840 REM ALLOT TREASURE
2850 FOR J=1 TO 7
2860   M=INT(RND*19)+1
2870   IF M=6 OR M=11 OR A(M,7)<>0 THEN 2860
2880   A(M,7)=INT(RND*100)+100
2890 NEXT J

2910 REM ALLOT MONSTERS
2920 FOR J=1 TO 6
2930   M=INT(RND*18)+1
2940   IF M=6 OR M=11 OR A(M,7)<>0 THEN 2930
2950   A(M,7)=-J
2960 NEXT J
2970 A(4,7)=100+INT(RND*100)
2980 A(16,7)=100+INT(RND*100)

...

3310 DATA   0,  2,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0
3320 DATA   1,  3,  3,  0,  0,  0,  0
3330 DATA   2,  0,  5,  2,  0,  0,  0
3340 DATA   0,  5,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0
3350 DATA   4,  0,  0,  3, 15, 13,  0
3360 DATA   0,  0,  1,  0,  0,  0,  0
3370 DATA   0,  8,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0
3380 DATA   7, 10,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0
3390 DATA   0, 19,  0,  8,  0,  8,  0
3400 DATA   8,  0, 11,  0,  0,  0,  0
3410 DATA   0,  0, 10,  0,  0,  0,  0
3420 DATA   0,  0,  0, 13,  0,  0,  0
3430 DATA   0,  0, 12,  0,  5,  0,  0
3440 DATA   0, 15, 17,  0,  0,  0,  0
3450 DATA  14,  0,  0,  0,  0,  5,  0
3460 DATA  17,  0, 19,  0,  0,  0,  0
3470 DATA  18, 16,  0, 14,  0,  0,  0
3480 DATA   0, 17,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0
3490 DATA   9,  0, 16,  0,  0,  0,  0
Again, I’ve tweaked this code to improve readability, including adding indention on the loops, “modern-style”, and spacing to make the DATA statements form a “table”.

What’s this code doing?

  • Line 2690 defines an array (DIM) with two dimensions9 (19 by 7). This will store room data, an approach that allows code to be shared between all rooms: much cleaner than my first attempt at an adventure with each room having its own INPUT handler.
  • The two-level loop on lines 2700 through 2730 populates the room data from the DATA blocks. Nowadays you’d probably put that data in a separate file (probably JSON!). Each “row” represents a room, 1 to 19. Each “column” represents the room you end up at if you travel in a given direction: North, South, East, West, Up, or Down. The seventh column – always zero – represents whether a monster (negative number) or treasure (positive number) is found in that room. This column perhaps needn’t have been included: I imagine it’s a holdover from some previous version in which the locations of some or all of the treasures or monsters were hard-coded.
  • The loop beginning on line 2850 selects seven rooms and adds a random amount of treasure to each. The loop beginning on line 2920 places each of six monsters (numbered -1 through -6) in randomly-selected rooms. In both cases, the start and finish rooms, and any room with a treasure or monster, is ineligible. When my 8-year-old self finally deciphered what was going on I was awestruck at this simple approach to making the game dynamic.
  • Rooms 4 and 16 always receive treasure (lines 2970 – 2980), replacing any treasure or monster already there: the Private Meeting Room (always worth a diversion!) and the Treasury, respectively.
  • Curiously, room 9 (the lift) defines three exits, even though it’s impossible to take an action in this location: the player teleports to room 10 on arrival! Again, I assume this is vestigal code from an earlier implementation.
  • The “checksum” that’s tested on line 2740 is cute, and a younger me appreciated deciphering it. I’m not convinced it’s necessary (it sums all of the values in the DATA statements and expects 355 to limit tampering) though, or even useful: it certainly makes it harder to modify the rooms, which may undermine the code’s value as a teaching aid!
Map showing the layout of the castle in video game "Werewolves and the Wanderer". Entering from outside the castle, to the West, the player must progress through the ground floor, up the stairwell in the Inner Hallway, into the Lift, and then East to the exit, but there are several opportunities to diverge from this path and e.g. explore the dungeons or various dead ends on the ground or first floors.
By the time I was 10, I knew this map so well that I could draw it perfectly from memory. I almost managed the same today, aged 42. That memory’s buried deep!

Something you might notice is missing is the room descriptions. Arrays in this language are strictly typed: this array can only contain integers and not strings. But there are other reasons: line length limitations would have required trimming some of the longer descriptions. Also, many rooms have dynamic content, usually based on random numbers, which would be challenging to implement in this way.

As a child, I did once try to refactor the code so that an eighth column of data specified the line number to which control should pass to display the room description. That’s a bit of a no-no from a “mixing data and logic” perspective, but a cool example of metaprogramming before I even knew it! This didn’t work, though: it turns out you can’t pass a variable to a Locomotive BASIC GOTO or GOSUB. Boo!10

An experimental program being run that attempts to GOSUB a variable, failing with a syntax error on the relevant line.
In hindsight, I could have tested the functionality before I refactored with a very simple program, but I was only around 10 or 11 and still had lots to learn!

Werewolves and Wanderer has many faults11. But I’m clearly not the only developer whose early skills were honed and improved by this game, or who hold a special place in their heart for it. Just while writing this post, I discovered:

A decade or so later, I’d be taking my first steps as a professional software engineer. A couple more decades later, I’m still doing it.

And perhaps that adventure -the one that’s occupied my entire adult life – was facilitated by this text-based one from the 1980s.

Footnotes

1 The game that had the biggest impact on my life, it might surprise you to hear, is not among the “top ten videogames that stole my life” that I wrote about almost exactly 16 years ago nor the follow-up list I published in its incomplete form three years later. Turns out that time and impact are not interchangable. Who knew?

2 The game is variously known as Werewolves and Wanderer, Werewolves and Wanderers, or Werewolves and the Wanderer. Or, on any system I’ve been on, WERE.BAS, WEREWOLF.BAS, or WEREWOLV.BAS, thanks to the CPC’s eight-point-three filename limit.

3 Additionally, it was thought that having to undertake the (painstakingly tiresome) process of manually re-entering the source code for a program might help teach you a little about the code and how it worked, although this depended very much on how readable the code and its comments were. Tragically, the more comprehensible some code is, the more long-winded the re-entry process.

4 The CPC’s got a fascinating history in its own right, but you can read that any time.

5 One of my favourite features of home microcomputers was that seconds after you turned them on, you could start programming. Your prompt was an interface to a programming language. That magic had begun to fade by the time DOS came to dominate (sure, you can program using batch files, but they’re neither as elegant nor sophisticated as any BASIC dialect) and was completely lost by the era of booting directly into graphical operating systems. One of my favourite features about the Web is that it gives you some of that magic back again: thanks to the debugger in a modern browser, you can “tinker” with other people’s code once more, right from the same tool you load up every time. (Unfortunately, mobile devices – which have fast become the dominant way for people to use the Internet – have reversed this trend again. Try to View Source on your mobile – if you don’t already know how, it’s not an easy job!)

6 In particular, one frustration I remember from my first text-based adventure was that I’d been unable to work around Locomotive BASIC’s lack of string escape sequences – not that I yet knew what such a thing would be called – in order to put quote marks inside a quoted string!

7 “Screen editors” is what we initially called what you’d nowadays call a “text editor”: an application that lets you see a page of text at the same time, move your cursor about the place, and insert text wherever you feel like. It may also provide features like copy/paste and optional overtyping. Screen editors require more resources (and aren’t suitable for use on a teleprinter) compared to line editors, which preceeded them. Line editors only let you view and edit a single line at a time, which is how most of my first 6 years of programming was done.

8 In a modern programming language, you might use while true or similar for a main game loop, but this requires pushing the “outside” position to the stack… and early BASIC dialects often had strict (and small, by modern standards) limits on stack height that would have made this a risk compared to simply calling a subroutine from one line and then jumping back to that line on the next.

9 A neat feature of Locomotive BASIC over many contemporary and older BASIC dialects was its support for multidimensional arrays. A common feature in modern programming languages, this language feature used to be pretty rare, and programmers had to do bits of division and modulus arithmetic to work around the limitation… which, I can promise you, becomes painful the first time you have to deal with an array of three or more dimensions!

10 In reality, this was rather unnecessary, because the ON x GOSUB command can – and does, in this program – accept multiple jump points and selects the one referenced by the variable x.

11 Aside from those mentioned already, other clear faults include: impenetrable controls unless you’ve been given instuctions (although that was the way at the time); the shopkeeper will penalise you for trying to spend money you don’t have, except on food, presumably as a result of programmer laziness; you can lose your flaming torch, but you can’t buy spares in advance (you can pay for more, and you lose the money, but you don’t get a spare); some of the line spacing is sometimes a little wonky; combat’s a bit of a drag; lack of feedback to acknowledge the command you enterted and that it was successful; WHAT’S WITH ALL THE CAPITALS; some rooms don’t adequately describe their exits; the map is a bit linear; etc.

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Debugging Mysteries

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Just wanted to share with you something I found ages ago but only just got around to mentioning – Julia Evans‘ (of Wizard Zines fame) Debugging Mysteries:

There are five mysteries here right now:

The Case of the Slow Websites
The Case of the Connection Timeout
The Case of the DNS Update that Didn’t Work
The Case of the 50ms Request
The Case of the Failed Docker Connection

Go back to wizardzines.com

GitHub repository: jvns/twine-stories
Blog post about this project: Notes on building debugging puzzles

Each mystery is a Twine-powered “choose your own adventure” game in which you must diagnose the kind of issue that a software developer might, for real. I think these are potentially excellent tools for beginner programmers, not just because they provide some information about the topic of each, but because they encourage cultivating a mindset of the kind of thinking that’s required to get to the bottom of gnarly problems.

Better yet, she’s open-sourced the entire thing (and I was excited to see she wrote in Twee, which is very dear to my heart).

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Twinebook – Printable Interactive Fiction

Update: I’ve ceased hosting a public version of this project, but you can still check out the source code and run it for yourself.

Twine 2 is a popular tool for making hypertext interactive fiction, but there’s something about physical printed “choose your own adventure”-style gamebooks that isn’t quite replicated when you’re playing on the Web. Maybe it’s the experience of keeping your finger in a page break to facilitate a “save point” for when you inevitably have to backtrack and try again?

Annabe enjoying Choose Your Own (Minecraft) Story books.
These are the first branching novels I’ve introduced her to for which she’s felt the need to take notes.

As a medium for interactive adventures, paper isn’t dead! Our 7-year-old is currently tackling the second part of a series of books by John Diary, the latest part of which was only published in December! But I worry that authors of printed interactive fiction might have a harder time than those producing hypertext versions. Keeping track of all of your cross-references and routes is harder than writing linear fiction, and in the hypertext

Hand-written note showing branching path story plan, from John Diary's Twitter.
John Diary tweeted about his process back in 2017 and it looks… more manual than I’d want.

Twinebook

So I’ve thrown together Twinebook, an experimental/prototype tool which aims to bring the feature-rich toolset of Twine to authors of paper-based interactive fiction. Simply: you upload your compiled Twine HTML to Twinebook and it gives you a printable PDF file, replacing the hyperlinks with references in the style of “turn to 27” to instruct the player where to go next. By default, the passages are all scrambled to keep it interesting, but with the starting passage in position 1… but it’s possible to override this for specific passages to facilitate puzzles that require flipping to specific numbered passages.

Thumb in the page of a Sorcery choose-your-own-adventure gamebook.
In some adventure games, keeping your thumb in the page feels like it’s essential.

Obviously, it doesn’t work with any kind of “advanced” Twine game – anything that makes use of variables, Javascript, etc., for example! – unless you can think of a way to translate these into the written word… which is certainly possible – see Fighting Fantasy‘s skill, stamina, luck and dice-rolling mechanics, for example! – but whether it’s desirable is up to individual authors.

If this tool is valuable to anybody, that’s great! Naturally I’ve open-sourced the whole thing so others can expand on it if they like. If you find it useful, let me know.

Twine screenshot showing many branching paths of the game "Inpatient".
Mapping a complex piece of interactive fiction is a job for a computer, not a human.

If you’re interested in the possibility of using Twine to streamline the production of printable interactive fiction, give my Twinebook prototype a try and let me know what you think.

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Mackerelmedia Fish

Normally this kind of thing would go into the ballooning dump of “things I’ve enjoyed on the Internet” that is my reposts archive. But sometimes something is so perfect that you have to try to help it see the widest audience it can, right? And today, that thing is: Mackerelmedia Fish.

Mackerelmedia Fish reports: WARNING! Your Fish have escaped!
Historical fact: escaped fish was one of the primary reasons for websites failing in 1996.

What is Mackerelmedia Fish? I’ve had a thorough and pretty complete experience of it, now, and I’m still not sure. It’s one or more (or none) of these, for sure, maybe:

  • A point-and-click, text-based, or hypertext adventure?
  • An homage to the fun and weird Web of yesteryear?
  • A statement about the fragility of proprietary technologies on the Internet?
  • An ARG set in a parallel universe in which the 1990s never ended?
  • A series of surrealist art pieces connected by a loose narrative?

Rock Paper Shotgun’s article about it opens with “I don’t know where to begin with this—literally, figuratively, existentially?” That sounds about right.

I stared into THE VOID and am OK!
This isn’t the reward for “winning” the “game”. But I was proud of it anyway.

What I can tell you with confident is what playing feels like. And what it feels like is the moment when you’ve gotten bored waiting for page 20 of Argon Zark to finish appear so you decide to reread your already-downloaded copy of the 1997 a.r.k bestof book, and for a moment you think to yourself: “Whoah; this must be what living in the future feels like!”

Because back then you didn’t yet have any concept that “living in the future” will involve scavenging for toilet paper while complaining that you can’t stream your favourite shows in 4K on your pocket-sized supercomputer until the weekend.

Dancing... thing?
I was always more of a Bouncing Blocks than a Hamster Dance guy, anyway.

Mackerelmedia Fish is a mess of half-baked puns, retro graphics, outdated browsing paradigms and broken links. And that’s just part of what makes it great.

It’s also “a short story that’s about the loss of digital history”, its creator Nathalie Lawhead says. If that was her goal, I think she managed it admirably.

An ASCII art wizard on a faux Apache directory listing page.
Everything about this, right down to the server signature (Artichoke), is perfect.

If I wasn’t already in love with the game already I would have been when I got to the bit where you navigate through the directory indexes of a series of deepening folders, choose-your-own-adventure style. Nathalie writes, of it:

One thing that I think is also unique about it is using an open directory as a choose your own adventure. The directories are branching. You explore them, and there’s text at the bottom (an htaccess header) that describes the folder you’re in, treating each directory as a landscape. You interact with the files that are in each of these folders, and uncover the story that way.

Back in the naughties I experimented with making choose-your-own-adventure games in exactly this way. I was experimenting with different media by which this kind of branching-choice game could be presented. I envisaged a project in which I’d showcase the same (or a set of related) stories through different approaches. One was “print” (or at least “printable”): came up with a Twee1-to-PDF converter to make “printable” gamebooks. A second was Web hypertext. A third – and this is the one which was most-similar to what Nathalie has now so expertly made real – was FTP! My thinking was that this would be an adventure game that could be played in a browser or even from the command line on any (then-contemporary: FTP clients aren’t so commonplace nowadays) computer. And then, like so many of my projects, the half-made version got put aside “for later” and forgotten about. My solution involved abusing the FTP protocol terribly, but it worked.

(I also looked into ways to make Gopher-powered hypertext fiction and toyed with the idea of using YouTube annotations to make an interactive story web [subsequently done amazingly by Wheezy Waiter, though the death of YouTube annotations in 2017 killed it]. And I’ve still got a prototype I’d like to get back to, someday, of a text-based adventure played entirely through your web browser’s debug console…! But time is not my friend… Maybe I ought to collaborate with somebody else to keep me on-course.)

Three virtual frogs. One needs a hug.
My first batch of pet frogs died quite quickly, but these ones did okay.

In any case: Mackerelmedia Fish is fun, weird, nostalgic, inspiring, and surreal, and you should give it a go. You’ll need to be on a Windows or OS X computer to get everything you can out of it, but there’s nothing to stop you starting out on your mobile, I imagine.

Sso long as you’re capable of at least 800 × 600 at 256 colours and have 4MB of RAM, if you know what I mean.

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