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The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams

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Re: The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams

#41

Post by nsxwolf »

ScottAdams wrote: post #32
nsxwolf wrote: post #22

Hi Scott, for the TI-99/4A versions of your games, did you handle the development of the ROM cartridge? What was that like? Did you have to split up any of your code to separate the game engine from the adventures themselves?

Hi! I did the entire programming of obth of the TI cartrige games, the text adventure cartridge (read in the games from cassette) and the special made-for-TI graphical text adventure in a cartridge: Return to Pirates Island. My game language interpreter was already separate from games written in my adventure language. So putting the interpreter on the cartridge was not very difficult. See one of the other threads on…

You were using good software engineering principles way back then!

Now my obligitory fanboying: Those text adventures were an important part of my formative years. They inspired me to learn how to write more advanced programs, because I desperately wanted to create my own text adventures. My first one was a gigantic, unwieldy tree of if/then/else statements, and that painful experience led me to more learn advanced data structures and concepts.

Re: The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams

#42

Post by Veen »

ModernMech wrote: post #37
Veen wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She is 33 and was 25 when they met. That is not "extremely young". She's a mature adult, and presumably she knows what she's doing.

He’s an extremely wealthy divorcé in his mid 60s. She’s a 33 year old model… which is well past the top end of that career, with two children, who is now the VP of Adams’ WhenHub. I think it’s clear everyone in that relationship knows what they are doing. Doesn’t make it any less the fact that he’s old enough to be her father.

Is this a American cultural quirk I'm not understanding? Who cares that he's old enough to be her father? Why is it interesting or relevant? He married an attractive younger woman. She married a rich older man. It happens every day all over the world. Its not the first marriage for either of them and they both already have children. It says very little about either person involved except that one likes attractive women and the other likes rich men with a sense of humor (if we assume the most cynical motivations).

Re: The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams

#43

Post by stickfigure »

ModernMech wrote: post #37
Veen wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She is 33 and was 25 when they met. That is not "extremely young". She's a mature adult, and presumably she knows what she's doing.

He’s an extremely wealthy divorcé in his mid 60s. She’s a 33 year old model… which is well past the top end of that career, with two children, who is now the VP of Adams’ WhenHub. I think it’s clear everyone in that relationship knows what they are doing. Doesn’t make it any less the fact that he’s old enough to be her father.

> Doesn’t make it any less the fact that he’s old enough to be her father.

Honest question: So what? Why does that trouble you?

I would understand if one side was indeed "extremely" young, but 60s/30s are unquestionably adults, and there don't seem to be any consent issues.

Re: The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams

#44

Post by ScottAdams »

pamoroso wrote: post #35
ScottAdams wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really good question! I was working on a TRS-80 Level II machine (this was a model 1 before there wer models). It was my first home appliance computer, before that I had homebrews. It came with Microsoft Basic. I had only used tiny basic up until then and wanted to play with strings. It sounded neat to be able to manipulate language with them. I wrote a game language, a compiler for the language, and an interpreter f…

Very interesting, thanks. I wonder whether you distributed those early commercial games as BASIC source on tape.

Adventureland and Pirate Adventure were both originally done in BASIC and the interpreter with the compiled language (it reduced it to numbers) was on the tape. I did have some extremely clever folks reverse engineer my language and then write games in it! Hat tip to Alvin Files and William Demas amongst others!

Re: The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams

#45

Post by seanwilson »

Hi Scott! Do you have any thoughts on how hard it is to come up with original adventure game puzzles and what your process is here?

When I was looking at this once, I noticed there's a lot of puzzles that are shared between recent adventure games that you can find in older adventure games too e.g. screwdriver + screws, rusty door + oil, distract an NPC so you can steal something. Instead of this being from lack of originality, I think instead there's some limits on how many puzzle like this exist because they have to be common sense + not completely obvious + involve physical object manipulation + use common objects. I think this is one of the reasons a lot of recent adventure games and escape room games devolve into doors with abstract logic problems to unlock them. Alternatively, they need to introduce new mechanics to widen the design space, like adding time travel or magic.

Re: The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams

#46

Post by pamoroso »

ScottAdams wrote: post #44
pamoroso wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting, thanks. I wonder whether you distributed those early commercial games as BASIC source on tape.

Adventureland and Pirate Adventure were both originally done in BASIC and the interpreter with the compiled language (it reduced it to numbers) was on the tape. I did have some extremely clever folks reverse engineer my language and then write games in it! Hat tip to Alvin Files and William Demas amongst others!

Got it, thanks again.

Re: The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams

#47

Post by s7r »

ScottAdams wrote: post #19
TigeriusKirk wrote: post #14

Scott, what was the thinking behind publishing the source code to some of your early games in magazines (at a time when you could still sell them profitably)? It obviously worked out well, but it sounds like a bold step to take.

I was approached by Byte Magazine to do a feature article for them. I included my game source code in it as I wanted to share the technology I had developed with others. Sadly there were a number of typos when they transcribed it into the magazine. Yet many people were able to press through and debug it to get it work which was pretty amazing. My thought was we are all standing on the shoulder's of those who went bef…

> My thought was we are all standing on the shoulder's of those who went before us. By helping each other we build towards a better future.

Inspired by this comment, just wanted to share this with you:

https://manyworlds.pages.dev/about

Still in development (first time sharing the site!) — in any case, thought it might resonate!

Re: The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams

#48

Post by ScottAdams »

seanwilson wrote: post #45

Hi Scott! Do you have any thoughts on how hard it is to come up with original adventure game puzzles and what your process is here? When I was looking at this once, I noticed there's a lot of puzzles that are shared between recent adventure games that you can find in older adventure games too e.g. screwdriver + screws, rusty door + oil, distract an NPC so you can steal something. Instead of this being from lack of or…

My process has always been one of inspiration from a higher power.

I would place a location, think of obvious items for the locations and then pretend I was there. What would I try to do and why? Then I would sit and think about it.

I also enjoyed putting it in front of beta testers and seeing what new and unique things they might try that I would want to incorporate into the game.

A big tip of the hat to Neil Novak one of my classic game testers from whom I got a lot of great inspiration!

As far as new puzzles go I hope you try the new section I wrote for Adventureland XL. I have a large number of new puzzles and one that I am especially happy with that went in a direction I hadn't done before.

To get into the XL section of Adventureland you do first need to complete the base game and it has changed a bit with a few new puzzles of its own. You can never loose so don't ever start over. Just keep playing and let me know what you think :)

Re: The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams

#50

Post by ModernMech »

stickfigure wrote: post #43
ModernMech wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s an extremely wealthy divorcé in his mid 60s. She’s a 33 year old model… which is well past the top end of that career, with two children, who is now the VP of Adams’ WhenHub. I think it’s clear everyone in that relationship knows what they are doing. Doesn’t make it any less the fact that he’s old enough to be her father.

> Doesn’t make it any less the fact that he’s old enough to be her father. Honest question: So what? Why does that trouble you? I would understand if one side was indeed "extremely" young, but 60s/30s are unquestionably adults, and there don't seem to be any consent issues.

It doesn’t trouble me personally, I stated the facts of the matter and that my interpretation of it is that everyone is getting what they want. Others here have stated it weirds them out and that’s fine too. It’s well known in our society that this kind of age gap can be problematic for some. We have little “rules” about it (https://xkcd.com/314/), which are just societal norms. Scott Adam falls out of this norm and it makes people uncomfortable, as norm-breaking tends to do. One question people might ask is, why don’t you date someone your own age? There are a lot of reasons one could answer, but when one says something like “I don’t talk about where we met. People make judgments”, and they are already breaking norms, then I think it’s fine some people have reservations. Not that those reservations mean anything to anyone, but it’s not an unreasonable feeling to have when confronted with such an unconventional relationship.
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