Posted Sunday, September 21, 2008 by
Hap Aziz
My first encounter with text adventure games was back in the fall of 1980 when I got a job with a communications engineering company. The company ran a Data General Eclipse minicomputer, and one of the programs on it was the original Colossal Cave Adventure program written back in the late 1970s. Several of us in the office would stay late to sit in the terminal room and explore the virtual world, asking each other for help when the puzzles were particularly challenging. We all spent a fair amount of time typing one- or two-word commands at the cursor hoping we were on track to unravel the puzzles sprinkled throughout the game. Soon after that, I purchased a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A computer, and I was delighted to find a whole series of adventure games by Scott Adams.
It was late in 1981 when I acquired my first IBM PC that I also got my first game for it: Deadline by Infocom. Infocom was a company that specialized in what they termed "Interactive Fiction," that is, text adventure environments written in sophisticated prose format. The game natural language parser was also able to "understand" short sentence input rather than simply two-word phrases. It was then that my taste for text adventures--interactive fiction--grew to the point where I began to write my own. The language available to me on my PC was BASIC, and I wrote thousands of lines of procedural code to build my games. Over the years I've used BASIC, Pascal, C, C++, Lingo, Java, and even LISP to build my games.
Not too long ago, I discovered the Inform sofware (currently Inform 7) development system. Inform is an environment specifically design to author interactive fiction. The language of Inform is set up specifically to support the conventions of interactive fiction, which makes it easier to program these types of game. For example, if I wanted to set up a space where there was a Kitchen and a Dining Room, with the Kitchen to the north, I would write simply:
> Kitchen is a room.
> Dining Room is a room.
> Dining Room is south of the Kitchen.
At that point if I run the program is start out in the Kitchen, and if I type "s" (for south) at the prompt, I see that I have moved into the Dining Room--and I can type "n" to move back to the Kitchen.
Of course, the programming environment supports much more than moving around virtual locations, but the exciting thing is that it takes care of the programming underpinnings while the author/programmer can focus on the logic of the game itself. That is very appealing.
But the most exciting development for me is the release of Frotz for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Frotz is an interpreter that lets a target computer platform run interactive fiction files. I can play all my old Infocom games... or I can write my own games in Inform 7 and run them on my iPod Touch. That's what I'm talking about!
- Hap Aziz