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

the-ventureweaver.itch.io

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

#51

Post by kqr »

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.…

It was the same for me, except I grew up slightly later and did it with HTML documents and hyperlinks! (And in one case, I even think I got some help with an imagemap. Clicking the little hole in the foundation to the house led to an easter egg.)

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

#52

Post by DrSiemer »

rectang wrote: post #36
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.…

When I was in Jr. High, we had an Atari 400. Mostly I used it to play Missile Command and Star Raiders, but it also came with a BASIC cartridge. In the back of the manual were four BASIC programs. The first three were very simple, stuff like a loop that prints your name 10 times and then exits. The last program balanced your checkbook. It was 4 pages long. I laboriously typed it in, hunt-and-peck style, which took ho…

In my experience, a core skill of programmers is that they are people who are able to deal with setbacks and frustration in a good way. Those come with the territory.

I've always wondered if there is a correlation between developers and people that can enjoy tough but fair games like Super Meat Boy because of this.

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

#53

Post by kqr »

arscan wrote: post #43
skopje wrote: post #40

I downloaded the rooms.txt file and the word "handcrafted" is doing some heavy lifting. It's like one sentence per room. Did I miss something? I don't want to play the game (I hate text adventures), but I want an idea of how much effort went into this. Example: --ROOM 22 START-- Village of Oathmoor 23,0,0,21 You find yourself in a narrow, dimly lit alley. An ELDERLY WOMAN sits perched on a broken stool, her piercing…

Even if it’s only 1 sentence per room (it’s not), that’s still 4000 sentences. I’d guess this is at least a few hundred pages of written work (without downloading it and just based on what you’ve shared). That seems pretty substantial to me. Not sure what the length has to do with handcraftedness though. This comment is handcrafted even if it is short.

Going by the sample rooms above, (27, 21, 24, 28, 27) words multiplied by 4000 rooms divided by 350–450 words per page yields 200–300 pages indeed. But if it's mainly exposition and not interactable I can see how it would become dull reading quickly.

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

#54

Post by ianbicking »

deadbabe wrote: post #46

A text adventure of all things seems like it’d be great for AI though. You could have natural open ended conversations with NPCs to learn whatever they can tell you about the world, for example. This is one area where human generated content isn’t really better, you’d just end up with boring dialog trees to traverse.

Text adventures and AI-driven interactions are surprisingly different I've found... https://ianbicking.org/blog/2025/07/intra-llm-text-adventure – still not sure what the right fusion might be.

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

#56

Post by kqr »

deadbabe wrote: post #46

A text adventure of all things seems like it’d be great for AI though. You could have natural open ended conversations with NPCs to learn whatever they can tell you about the world, for example. This is one area where human generated content isn’t really better, you’d just end up with boring dialog trees to traverse.

It doesn't work as well as you think it would. There are no AIs today that model the world well enough to drive a text adventure. They can be used to embellish a more primitive world model, but then they tend to invent details that don't exist. People have tried, it's just not been very good compared to a hand-crafted text adventure.

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

#57

Post by sdenton4 »

Jemaclus wrote: post #34
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.

IIRC, AvatarMUD (avatar.outland.org) has 20,000+ rooms in it. It's been a long time since I played, but it's absolutely massive!

Yah, aardwolf (the one o played in ancient times) apparently has 35,000 rooms.

Collaborative building over decades adds up!

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

#59

Post by fasbiner »

skopje wrote: post #40

I downloaded the rooms.txt file and the word "handcrafted" is doing some heavy lifting. It's like one sentence per room. Did I miss something? I don't want to play the game (I hate text adventures), but I want an idea of how much effort went into this. Example: --ROOM 22 START-- Village of Oathmoor 23,0,0,21 You find yourself in a narrow, dimly lit alley. An ELDERLY WOMAN sits perched on a broken stool, her piercing…

I think you're saying what the average person is thinking but is worried about being impolite. You are of course correct: it is the kind of fact about a game that non-gamers might still mistake for quality or depth.

The horseshoe theory of ai generation tells us that handcrafting and content generation extremism end up very close to each other: https://emshort.blog/2016/09/21/bowls-of-oatmeal-and-text-ge...

The fact that something is generated or hand-crafted is not interesting by itself no matter how much people try to pretend otherwise for social cohesion purposes. Mediocre thing + no AI and Mediocre thing + AI seem to be orthogonal to what people actually care about at the end of the day.

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

#60

Post by EvanAnderson »

Telemakhos wrote: post #30
EvanAnderson wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm jealous of your experience. That sounds very cool.

Looking back I wish I'd had a mentor. I think I would have accomplished so much more if I'd had somebody to offer some guidance and gentle direction.

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