New retro game: "Dorm: Adventure at the 8-Bit Assembly"

Dorm-Logo

This is an Infocom-style retro text adventure, made in Inform 6 using PunyInform. The game comes with extensive Feelies.

This is my first IF game.

It’s available to download and play now: DORM: Adventure at the 8-Bit Assembly

The download includes a .z3 file to play offline using an interpreter such as Frotz or Lectrote, and also includes an Apple II disk image for a seriously old-school experience.

This is an old fashioned puzzlefest. If you get stuck, the web site has InvisiClues style hints, as well as a complete walkthrough and map. There is also a For Your Amusement section should you complete the game.

Like anybody’s first game, it is probably riddled with bugs.

Synopsis:

You’re about to attend a retro Apple II computer convention styled after KansasFest, where you’ll stay in a university dorm along with fellow vintage computer nerds. You’ll compete in silly contests, brave dubious cafeteria food and sweltering Midwest heat, and try to find a boxed copy of your favourite Infocom game.

At the same time, rumours fly about dark magic and bizarre occurrences, not helped by the black robed figures you keep spotting around campus. Are those professors, or something more nefarious? Meanwhile, an angry throng of Commodore protestors is amassing at the front gate, and an unhinged Macintosh pirate is menacing the quad in a Bondi blue Volkswagen Beetle.

Will you find a copy of Wishbringer to add to your collection, or will the campus literally come alive and start eating attendees? And did that massive statue of a bull over by the bleachers just blink?? Uh oh.

Dorm is available now for Apple II and lesser computers.

Acknowledgements:

I made this game but it was far from a solo project.

I’d particularly like to thank the amazingly kind people who helped beta test the game, including these IF community forum members: @dee_cooke, @fredrik.ramsberg, and @johnnywz00. A number of people from other places were also a huge help with testing. I couldn’t have made this without all of them.

The game is released free with an MIT Licence.

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Congrats on the release :slight_smile:

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Looks good. I’m going to give it a play as soon as I finish my Punyjam entry. :slight_smile:

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Check this out peeps! There’s good stuff here!

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Thanks for the game!

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I’ve been finding it incredibly funny, which started just with reading the feelies.

I was a little surprised there’s no TRANSCRIPT command, and maybe UNDO, too? Though it doesn’t seem like the kind of game where you need to UNDO all the time, the first time I died, I realised there was no UNDO. But I had saved once before that.

-Wade

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Thanks, Wade. I’d love to be able to say the lack of TRANSCRIPT and UNDO was some sort of adherence to a retro aesthetic. But nope, it’s just due to me being a n00b.

One of my main goals was to make an Apple II text adventure, so that’s why I selected PunyInform and the .z3 parser format. That limited me to just 128K for the whole shebang. Tough to squeeze a game with 70 rooms and 246 objects into that tiny file size.

I ended up not being able to include the Extended Metaverbs option, which include things like TRANSCRIPT but also adds 940 bytes. I didn’t have the bytes to spare. A better programmer than me would’ve found a way. But instead you got ME! :wink:

UNDO, on the other hand, isn’t available in the .z3 format at all. But again, that was because of my insistence on making an Apple II game.

(It’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me.)

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On the plus side, a number of Z-machine interpreters add UNDO support. I know Frotz does, I’m not sure about Bocfel.

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Love the feelies!

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Yeah, my guess before you replied was that you had Space Challenges. I don’t think anyone will really miss UNDO in the context of this game. The lack of TRANSCRIPT just makes it a bit harder to send you one of my play :slight_smile: However, I’m playing using Spatterlight, which has effectively unlimited (or just a kind of enormous I haven’t seen the bottom of yet) history. So I can do giant copy-pastes.

I was tempted to say you put the ‘Are you keeping up with the Commodore?’ jingle back in my head. But after a fashion, it never really left. As host nation of this song, we had to sing this instead of the school anthem once a week in primary school.

-Wade

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FYI (although I guess you already know), you can export to a .D64 for the FAR SUPERIOR Commodore 64 here: Ozmoo Online

:slight_smile:

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I dunno, that’s not what the back of the packaging says:

Apple-II-and-Lesser-Computers

:wink:

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Hahahaha yeah, I was joking :slight_smile: And I’m happy to notice we share some comedic skills. I didn’t check the packaging…

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All of this is fine, and I completely loved the story, I laughed a lot, and I was glad for having the putty and everything. But: Why for the love of the holy Woz isn’t there a version for my Apple 64?

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Now I know what I’m doing this weekend! And no hopping over the spoiler fence anyone before we’ve had a chance to give this one a go :wink:

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I don’t suppose it’s available as a *.D64 disk image for the Commodore-64 (especially after that crack about “angry throng of Commodore protestors”) but I just thought I’d ask… Justin Cayce, you know…

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It’s available as a z3 file. As Marco said, you can use Ozmoo Online to build a d64 file.

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Wouldn’t that be a sacrilege?

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Nah, I think it would be totally cool (and absolutely fine with me) if someone wanted to make it available as a .D64 disk image for C64, or any other retro platform.

As a .z3 file, I think it can be written to disk image for a bunch of 8-bit computers, I just haven’t done it myself.

The game is released under the MIT licence, so basically anybody can do whatever they want with it, and I’d be delighted if somebody did.

Edit: if somebody does make a disk image for another platform, add a link on the IFDB entry for Dorm so people can grab it.

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Well, if you insist…! :wink:

Acorn was/is the transatlantic soulmate to Apple (in my whimsical imagination, at any rate!), so I thought it was a good fit.

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