I accidentally got into writing Text Adventures a few years ago.
In my normal life I like to do random things once. Just once, to see if I can do them. Then I move on and then I see if I can do a different thing once. Over the last 15 years I’ve written a book and had it published, I’ve written and released an album, I’ve set up one religion, I went vegetarian for one full month, I had a Podcast which ran for one season… that sort of random thing.
A few years ago I found a piece of software called Adventuron. Adventuron allows normal people like me to create fully working, stand alone text adventures using incredibly basic coding. The software practically writes the code for you as you work through it, and the results are great. I followed the online tutorial, which took about 45 minutes, and at the end of the tutorial I had the example game working perfectly. So I thought I’d add “Write a Text Adventure” to my list of one-off things.
The game I made was called “Adventure in 20 Rooms”, and it took me about a week of evenings to write. I also created and added graphics (which were awful). When I announced that I’d written a Text Adventure game on Twitter, the author of the software asked me whether it would be ok if he added it to the current competition. Apparently there was a prize for the “Best Game By A Newcomer”, and because this was my first (and last) game I qualified for entry. The prize for the competition, incidentally, was for Teletext Wizard Horsenburger to make the graphics for the winning entry.
Long story short, my game ended up winning the “Best Game By A Newcomer” competition, and Horsenburger got in touch with me.
I sent him the link to my game and he went to take a look. A few minutes later, after checking the link I sent to him, he came back to me.
Another one? A second game? That would be TWO games. I like doing things ONCE, not TWO-NCE!
It was this that lead to me making another game. It was the PLAYExpo Blackpool Game, and if you want to have a tinker you can play it online here – https://textadventure.80snostalgia.com/playexpo
Then I made another game and, after that, another. And another. And suddenly, I’d accidentally made about 8 games.
Then I started working on my ninth game, called ‘The Making A Cup Of Tea Game’. It’s a text adventure in which the player makes a cup of tea. I like the idea of making text adventures about things people have never made text adventures about, and previous ideas have included Pac-Man The Text Adventure, the Textless Text Adventure, and a game about a finger that travelled into the future with the help of a hamster. In The Making A Cup Of Tea Game, you can make a cup of tea in whichever order you like. Are you a Cup, Teabag, Water, Milk guy? Perhaps you’re a Cup, Milk, Teabag, Water lady? Maybe you prefer using a Teapot? You can make a cup of tea in any one of 17 different ways, and each method has a different ending.
And when it was almost ready, I made this trailer for it:
I was incredibly proud of this game! 17 different methods of creating a cuppa leading to 17 different endings, with the game adapting on-the-fly at each decision. The idea was that at each ending a different code word would be shown on the screen, and each code word gave the player one entry into a real life draw to win a big box of teabags. They just needed to send me an email with the code word on. The more endings the player found, the more entries into the draw. I was so excited to launch this!
I got great constructive feedback from a few beta testers, and one really good suggestion was to make the game change the longer the player played for. Making tea is great, but what if weird things started to happen the longer the game went on…
And I was like, ‘What genuinely superb advice!’ After making three or four different cups of tea, maybe a weird thing could happen! Something that would change the story! I had felt like the game needed a definite ending, and this was the ending it needed. I was 100% into this idea!
But then, I realised something huge. I mean, like, a massive problem. Every time the player makes a cup of tea, the game restarts. While you’re playing it, there is a counter counting up the number of turns the player has taken. As soon as tea is made, the game resets and the game step counter resets too. This means that it isn’t possible to have an event start after making a few brews, because after each one brew the running total stops.
I realised that if I had created the game using Variables to record the status of items rather than the default Adventuron commands, I would probably be able to implement some sort of ongoing count that would last over a few brews. But I hadn’t, and adapting the code to use variables or re-writing it to include them would take literally months. Months to add in functionality that would (probably) only be found by a handful of people. I mean, I do love niche things, (this game was being written to be played on a ZX Spectrum,) but adding additional story that hardly anyone would find into a game that hardly anyone would be playing would be a step towards madness.
So I stopped developing it. I converted it as it was into a Spectrum file, and abandoned it.
If you want to take a look at some of the screens from the game, you can here – 80sNostalgia – itch.io
I will upload the game itself to the Itch.io link above at some point in the future too, so you can play it for yourself on Spectrum emulators.