There is a chance.

Here is my test game for issue 1. I'll try to have this fixed asap.

start_at = my_location
locations {
   my_location : location "You are in a room." ;
}
integers {
   t : integer "0" ;
}
on_tick {
   : increment "t" ;
}
on_command {
   : match "test _"  {
      : print {("There has been " + t + " tick(s).")}
      : append "This is " ;
      : append "the" ;
      : print " second line." ;
   }
}

I'd like to ask everyone what their previous experience of text adventure games is, and, if they have previous experience, what are their favourite ta games, and if they prefer pure text or text and graphics?

Welcome to the jam Chris.

What were your top 3 adventure games on the spectrum?

Will you be producing speccy graphics, next graphics, or none of the above?

Thanks Garry. I forgot about that page actually.

No limits for intro / outro.

Hi Dee,

Atop of the faulty error messages, there was an underlying bug in the exporter when the 'block_when' condition was used.

This is now fixed. Press the refresh button in your browser, and it should (hopefully) be working now.

Chris

Hi Christopher,

(1) I'll take a look at the line breaks.

(2) No changing of colour yet in the 8-bit export to DAAD, but I will look at that too.

(3) Yes, there is no headerbar in the export with graphics mode. Please do set the header for each of your locations on the understanding that you'll have the option of a title bar, or to include your location header as a prefix to your location description, in capitals, in a future version.

Thanks for your reports. Hopefully none of these issues block your game, and glad to hear you are sanity checking the output of the exporter early.

Chris

Hi James,

Nice to have you on board.

I've just quickly checked out your music and I'll be spontaneously saying "live on other planets" all day now.  Nice beat, gotta play Hotline Miami with this soundtrack now.

Text adventures will be a change of pace for sure. 

Good luck!

Chris

Hi Dee,

'Lion' and 'Swim' were placeholder error messages that I never got round to fleshing out.

The good news is that I've updated the error messages now, and they should also point to a line number.

'Lion' was an error message that should have informed you that the block_when (or block_when_not) conditions have to reference a regular boolean (that you can set true and false) rather than a dynamic boolean. This is down to the 8-bit game engine not supporting them. It should be easy to avoid using dynamic booleans in this context.

'Swim' is a little interesting because I don't see anything in your code that should trigger it. I've rewritten the message as this now.

Block condition invalid, supported conditions are:
      'block_when', 'block_when_not', 'block_when_carried',
      'block_when_not_carried', 'block_when_not_exists',
      'block_when_exists', 'block_when_worn', &
      'block_when_not_worn'.

but, as I say, in your included code, I don't see you not using one of those conditions.

When you see the (above) message, look at the line number of the error, and send me the block code that is failing (you can switch out any specific text that is secret of course).

Let me know how you get along.

Thanks Garry.

It is extremely important with text adventure games that test with real players to make sure you are providing players with responses they expect from the game. 

For example, if you casually mention there is a trampoline in the room and the player types:

> JUMP TRAMPOLINE

And the game responds:

"I can't do that."

The player is likely to have a negative view of your game. Playtesting will find the majority of issues, at least early in your game, and you can take the wisdom from there and apply it to the rest of your game.

You should, as a general guide, allow several days for playtesting, playtesting should be performed before the jam deadline, so it's important you aim to complete your main development a week early, and go from there (even 24 hours of playtesting is better than nothing)

There are two suggestions here:

(1) Make the first part of the game a tutorial (for players unfamiliar with text adventure games).

(2) Ask a trusted friend to playtest.

You can use people you know as playtesters, or request a playtester here. Participants may also offer playtesting services for other playtesters. 

Hello,

I'm the author of Adventuron and I recently wrote an article on how to design text adventure games in 2020.

I think this will be useful to newcomers to the genre.

These are just my personal thoughts and observations.

https://medium.com/@model_train/text-adventure-game-design-in-2020-608528ac8bda

Feel free to disagree but I do think there are some good guiding principles in there.

Chris

Hi Jackie,

Welcome to the jam. I do hope that you get something from this. This is the least constrained jam so far, so it's very open to your imagination.

Do play both The Cave of Magic and Excalibur to get a feel for the flow of these games .

Good luck!

Chris

Hello all,

Adventuron is a small community that really benefits from advocates and champions.

Please share as much about the process on social media as you are comfortable with.

Live streaming too.

Be truthful even if you have criticisms.

The twitter hashtag is #nextadventurejam.

Thanks for taking part.

Chris

Good question.

I think the safe answer for now is to assume that trizbort import is dead. 

A dedicated visual map editor is coming directly to adventuron later this year, which is two way, so having a one way import probably would be more frustrating than it is liberating.

I invite you to use pen and paper then populate a table on your page whilst looking at your map on the screen in trizbort.

FROM, DIRECTION, TO

Next, inside adventuron, using control space, populate the connection {} section (see tutorial a animated GIFs as an example how it works).

It should take no more than 10 minutes to do it if you have the map in front of you in trizbort, but so sorry, assume this is manual for now (so that it doesn't become a bottleneck for you).

That said, I will see if there is a quick way I can fix the import if you mail the map to me, but no guarantees.

info@adventuron.io

Hi Chris,

Unfortunately, set string is not possible in 8-bit mode, as the DAAD engine does not support string variables.

You can append to a string buffer (without a linefeed) using the : append command.

: append "You see ";
: print "a cat";

Would print out (without a linefeed in the middle):

You should be able to print out a message that has a number in it like this too (but it doesn't work for strings).

: print {("You have collected " + bells_collected + " bells.")}

As far as chance goes, I hope this helps. I've also updated the documentation with the information I've posted here.

start_at = my_location
locations {
   my_location : location "You are in a room." ;
}
integers {
   // Only required if you are using store_random
   randomvar : integer ;
}
on_tick {
   : if (chance (50)) {
      // Will print hello 50 percent of the time
      : print "HELLO" ;
   }
   
   // Stores the random result in randomvar
   : store_random var = "randomvar" ;
   
   : if (randomvar < 33) {
      // Will print GOODBYE 33 percent of the time
      : print "GOODBYE" ;
   }
}

Welcome to the jam Cas!

Welcome back Dee. Looking forward to seeing what you have in store.

I'll clarify the rule a bit later on the main page to make what I've said here explicit.

Good luck in your adventure building!

Please do introduce yourself in the other thread if you have time.

This jam has an art requirement but it doesn't have a "excellent" art requirement

If you are not a natural artist, keep things very simple and abstract and focus on the game design instead. You can make a location out of abstract shapes if you wish.

I'm not an artist and I kept things simple when making location graphics for dinosaur island dx (the loading screen wasn't mine though). If I can do it, anyone can do it.

Please don't use digitised art (converted from a photo). It tends to look bad when shown at a low resolution and actually takes you out of the fantasy realm too.

Colourful graphics are the order of the day.

Good luck!

Chris

Hello,

I'm Chris, the author of Adventuron and host of this jam.

Please feel free to introduce yourself here.

Chris

The rule of thumb is basically not to use curse words, sexual content, or gratuitous violence.

Your game should aim to be universally enjoyable without the this type of content. No specific age range of the audience.

Please check out 1.0.2.

Fixed as of the next release.

Really happy to see you using them. I'll see if I can improve the choices UI later too.

Thanks, I'll take a look at it.

Hi Dee,

I added the following option to : choose;

: choose "Choose your destiny." experimental_columns = "3" ;

This should allow you to display more information horizontally.

Update Adventuron again if you want to make use of this.

Chris

Hi Dee,

Looking forward to checking out the awesome pixel graphics.

Can I ask that you store the text only version of the game somewhere, maybe add it as a standalone download to the page?

Chris

As of beta 31c, you can use layout

layout = SB + G D X O

+ = force add leading vertical padding (uses screen/paragraph_spacing_multiplier as the vertical padding amount). (off by default for graphics)

- = force remove trailing vertical padding (uses screen/paragraph_spacing_multiplier as the vertical padding amount). (on by default for graphics)

start_at    = my_location
start_theme = my_theme
locations {
   my_location : location "You are in a room." graphic = "blue" ;
}
themes {
   my_theme : theme {
      theme_settings {
         layout = SB + G - D X O
      }
      status_bar {
         : fixed_text "Left" ;
         : fixed_text "Right" ;
      }
      screen {
         paragraph_spacing_multiplier = 1
      }
      colors {
         status_bar_paper            = #fff
         status_bar_pen              = #000
      }
   }
}
assets {
   graphics {
      blue : base64_png "iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAQAAAABQCAIAAAB56TxyAAAAAXNSR0IArs4c6QAAAARnQU1BAACxjwv8YQUAAAAJcEhZcwAADsMAAA7DAcdvqGQAAADkSURBVHhe7dNBDQAwCACxOdsX8YhCyDWphb4/C1kCkCYAaQKQJgBpApAmAGkCkCYAaQKQJgBpApAmAGkCkCYAaQKQJgBpApAmAGkCkCYAaQKQJgBpApAmAGkCkCYAaQKQJgBpApAmAGkCkCYAaQKQJgBpApAmAGkCkCYAaQKQJgBpApAmAGkCkCYAaQKQJgBpApAmAGkCkCYAaQKQJgBpApAmAGkCkCYAaQKQJgBpApAmAGkCkCYAaQKQJgBpApAmAGkCkCYAaQKQJgBpApAmAGkCkCYAaQKQJgBpApAmAGkCEDZ7YUT2KK7hXcoAAAAASUVORK5CYII=";
   }
}

Yeh, was thinking about putting in a columns setting, let me see what I can do.

I think the compiled game will support them (without the userfont workaround), please confirm. I think I didn't link it to the preview pane properly (will rectify).

Update, try to refresh Adventuron now (Press CONTROL + F5), hopefully it should work now.

Hi all,

I uploaded a new version of Adventuron (beta 31).

It has the following features / fixes.

1 - Added Multiple choice commands.
2 - Fixed load / save screen refresh bug
3 - Added submit_command command.
4 - Fixed layout problems.
5 - Added French support to Bamburgh font.
6 - Minor bug fixes.

I know a few of you were complaining about the screen looking messy when you loaded a game, well, that's fixed now. There is also quite a simple multiple choice set of commands available now. You can add choices programmatically. See the documentation for that here.

Please note that this is not "gamebook" mode, but rather borrowed from the ongoing work I'm doing for gamebook mode. Should be quite useful if you want to build a conversation tree or dynamic help perhaps?

Chris

Hi Dee,

If you have time, check out the following documentation for adding dynamic multiple choices (new commands now available in beta 31):

https://adventuron.io/docs/tut/index.html#MultipleChoice

Might work well for Goblin Decathlon.

Chris

Thanks so much.

I really enjoyed seeing you play with the visual and sound features of Adventuron. 

Take care, stay safe.

Thanks Ben / Ellen.

The next jam will be coming along shortly. I'll announce here and on Twitter when it's ready.

You are absolutely right !!! 2nd place was a tie. I was going by listing order. 

So sorry DarkBlueMonkey.

I think we are fine for "prize money" staying in place ;-)

Maybe next jam we'll have some prizes.

The results to the (Adventuron) Treasure Hunt Jam are in. 

The overall winner is .....

Drum roll....

Dan dan daaaaan ....

TREASURES OF HOLLOWHILL

Congratulations to John Blythe who took first place with his Indiana-Jones-esque dig-site treasure hunt.

It really seems to have struck a chord with the judges. I'll never look at mouldy cheese the same way again.

This was a text-only competition with very tough limits on the amount of text that could be used for locations, incidental messages, and responses. Everyone did really well given the constraints.

I'll list the top 5 entries here. The winners are in separate categories.

The winners listed below are in the "Overall Enjoyment" category.

UPDATE 2020/04/08 - Updated to show that second place was a tie.

1. TREASURES OF HOLLOWHILL BY JOHN BLYTHE

2. UNTITLED BOWERBIRD GAME BY BENJAMIN & ELLEN RAGHEB (tied second)

2. THE PERFECT GEM - BY DARKBLUEMONKEY (tied second)

3. TASTYBUNS BURGERS BY VERDANT TOME

4. IGOR'S QUEST BY GARRY FRANCIS

Thank you to all entrants, and to the judges that dedicated so much of their time to playing each game.

I do hope you enjoyed entering the jam.  I was happy to see entrants helping and supporting each other. Big thank you to Garry in particular for going above and beyond with playtesting and feedback but everyone was awesome. So much appreciated in such a small community.

Another jam will be coming soon,  in part due to the lockdown., and in the spirit of everyone being locked down, it's going to have a lot less restrictions this time.

Click HERE to be added to the upcoming Adventuron gamejam mailing list.

Take care and thanks again,

Adventuron Chris

Great work Garry!

The TWO game never used : ask_question, so there was no downside to using ? as the prompt character. If you are using ask_question, then clearly there should be a different prompt for the question and the prompt itself. Garry's workaround is good, but I'll actually tweak the TWO theme to not alter the system default ">" character as the prompt character, and the "?" character as the question char.

This will make it's way into the next release of Adventuron, which is scheduled for after this jam ends. There will be a few little cleanups as of this release based on feedback and observations.