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A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

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Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

#21

Post by technothrasher »

arscan wrote: post #11

The first program I ever wrote was a choose your own adventure, I think written on my family’s IBM PC jr in Basic. It’s pretty amazing how far a kid can get with GOTO statements and a lot of patience. But for some reason I couldn’t (or didn’t know how to) save it, so I’d work on it all day, have my sister and mom play it, and then shut off the computer thus losing my days work. Or at least, that’s how I remember it.…

I made some text adventures in elementary school on the school's Apple II machines in the early 80's after playing Scott Adams' games (as a side note, it was amazing to be able to tell him directly many years later how much he influenced my learning to program). Anyway, a few years after I graduated from the school, I went back to visit, and some kids figured out it was me who's adventures they'd been playing and asked how to get past the one point in one that they couldn't figure out. I had to tell them, much to their disappointment, that I hadn't actually finished that game.

Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

#23

Post by nomel »

BiraIgnacio wrote: post #18
gigatree wrote: post #13

Looking forward to most posts having “No AI” tagged on. Definitely a huge plus.

This makes me wonder if there will be a time when "No AI" will be considered up-scale (of sorts) like hand-sewn clothes or artisan bread

You might like Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age".

Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

#24

Post by vunderba »

helpfulclippy wrote: post #16

I’m surprised to see a QBasic game with 1GHz CPU and 512MB RAM required! Is that because the game needs it, or because that’s what it takes to even run a modern OS with dosbox or something?

It's because it's not written in QBasic. It's written in a variant of QBasic called QB64 [1] - a spiritual successor to Microsoft's QBasic intended to run on modern 64-bit machines.

I went over the BAS source the last time this was posted a few weeks back and it has a lot of keywords that are specific to QB64 so unfortunately you can't run this on a true DOS machine (or DosBox).

[1] https://qb64.com

Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

#25

Post by nomel »

egypturnash wrote: post #17

If you are trying to beat the record for “most rooms in a text adventure”, I’m afraid you’ve got a long way to go - Level 9’s Snowball has more than 7k rooms.

Looks like marketing [1].

> The game is advertised as having more than 7.000 locations. In reality there are about 200 unique locations and the rest is part of a maze with exact locations.

[1] https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/6993/ZX-Spectrum/Snowb...

Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

#26

Post by EvanAnderson »

arscan wrote: post #11

The first program I ever wrote was a choose your own adventure, I think written on my family’s IBM PC jr in Basic. It’s pretty amazing how far a kid can get with GOTO statements and a lot of patience. But for some reason I couldn’t (or didn’t know how to) save it, so I’d work on it all day, have my sister and mom play it, and then shut off the computer thus losing my days work. Or at least, that’s how I remember it.…

Similar background here. The public library had Apple II machines and I became quite enamored with making proto-text adventures in Applesoft BASIC. Because you had to sign-up for time I wrote a lot of my programs longhand on nth generation photocopies of "program template" sheets that they handed out at the library (lined paper with columns for line numbers, statements, comments, etc).

The spaghetti code was astounding, and I remember squeezing line numbers between existing code-- adding a "31 GOTO 40" so I could squeeze a "room" into lines 32-39.

I never did grok the idea of building an "engine". Mostly I had PRINTs, INPUTs, and IF/GOTOs.

Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

#27

Post by selcuka »

egypturnash wrote: post #17

If you are trying to beat the record for “most rooms in a text adventure”, I’m afraid you’ve got a long way to go - Level 9’s Snowball has more than 7k rooms.

> over 6800 of these rooms are essentially identical. Snowball is used in this context as the ultimate illustration of the absurdities of old-school adventures, with their mazes and sprawling geographies full of corridors and empty rooms. [1]

[1] https://www.filfre.net/2013/06/snowball/

Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

#28

Post by arscan »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #26
arscan wrote: post #11

The first program I ever wrote was a choose your own adventure, I think written on my family’s IBM PC jr in Basic. It’s pretty amazing how far a kid can get with GOTO statements and a lot of patience. But for some reason I couldn’t (or didn’t know how to) save it, so I’d work on it all day, have my sister and mom play it, and then shut off the computer thus losing my days work. Or at least, that’s how I remember it.…

Similar background here. The public library had Apple II machines and I became quite enamored with making proto-text adventures in Applesoft BASIC. Because you had to sign-up for time I wrote a lot of my programs longhand on nth generation photocopies of "program template" sheets that they handed out at the library (lined paper with columns for line numbers, statements, comments, etc). The spaghetti code was astoundi…

Love it! It really is a good first program to write as a kid (at least those from a certain generation).

And my memory might be from our Apple 2gs and AppleScript, actually (hence my caveat in the comment). But I’m sure the program was just PRINTs, INPUTs, IFs and GOTOs :)

Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

#29

Post by CuriouslyC »

ATiredGoat wrote: post #2

In an age where games are written by algorithms and dialogue is generated by AI, The Labyrinth of Time’s Edge stands apart. It’s the first open world "like" modern text adventure written entirely by a single human being, no AI, no procedural generation, no corporate fingerprints. Just words, code, and imagination. Built in pure QBasic, The Labyrinth of Time’s Edge now spans over 3,900 handcrafted rooms which will be…

Maybe "human generated" is your marketing hook, but I personally don't care what the source of something is, I care about the quality.

Re: A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

#30

Post by Telemakhos »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #26
arscan wrote: post #11

The first program I ever wrote was a choose your own adventure, I think written on my family’s IBM PC jr in Basic. It’s pretty amazing how far a kid can get with GOTO statements and a lot of patience. But for some reason I couldn’t (or didn’t know how to) save it, so I’d work on it all day, have my sister and mom play it, and then shut off the computer thus losing my days work. Or at least, that’s how I remember it.…

Similar background here. The public library had Apple II machines and I became quite enamored with making proto-text adventures in Applesoft BASIC. Because you had to sign-up for time I wrote a lot of my programs longhand on nth generation photocopies of "program template" sheets that they handed out at the library (lined paper with columns for line numbers, statements, comments, etc). The spaghetti code was astoundi…

One of the most humbling moments in my life was learning from a friend what a object was, and how that differed from GOTO statements. I had already done something similar by inventing abstraction, when I figured out that I could pre-define certain musical notes and then use those defined notes more simply in my BASIC code. I had not, however, made the leap between re-using notes and re-using rooms in a text adventure. That realization that all re-used things can be abstracted was formative, and I am very thankful to my friend for having explained what he was doing with rooms. At some level, I regret that I learned BASIC before an object-oriented language; at another, I'm glad that I did, because my training in stupidity made very obvious to me my shortcoming in logic when I learned a better way.
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