Re-implementing Colossal Cave Adventure would be the next step up from COD, which, I agree, is the Hello World of IF.
If you are trying to prove your IF system is feature complete, I think working through all the examples given in the Inform 7 documentation might be an option.
Colossal Cave Adventure is already one of the most copiously ported games, already implemented in many systems, and I really don’t think it’s a good candidate for a “demonstration adventure”. That’d be like choosing War and Peace as a standard text for translation. Something a little more compact would be better… I guess, you could, as some authors have done, strip down Colossal Cave to a minimum number of rooms and essential puzzles and use that as the basis of a demo game.
agree, Colossal cave is so much more that what is needed. Perhaps a revised Cloak of Darkness (2023), where specs and walk-through are agreed to, by a community of several volunteers, as a more modern bench-mark.
Oh, mid-sized at best(*). Colossal Cave isn’t compact but its sprawl is mostly empty rooms.
It is widely ported, which argues that porting it is a relatively tackle-able task.
(* I tried to come up with a novel that would be an example of “comfortably mid-sized but padded-out with extra wordage,” but it would just turn into a literary flamefest so let’s skip it. :)
There can’t be many systems that don’t already have a version of Colossal Cave, though. Personally I couldn’t get excited about working on yet another port of that.
Oddly enough, I’m not sure if there’s an Inform 7 version of the 350-point Colossal Cave, though there is one of the unfinished Crowther version. (Years ago I started working on one while learning Inform 7, but I’m unlikely to finish it. I expect many could say the same.)
Hmmm. And if you don’t cover each one, then it’s incomplete? Or if you have an extra feature, it’s not really IF?
The sad part about Cloak of Darkness is that it hasn’t changed because there is fundamentally a wish for it not to change.
Where is the initiative for extensions, plugins, extra taxonomies? Where is the Cloak of Darkness on board a wayward cruise ship? With a day/night cycle? With timed puzzles, side missions, or power-ups?
‘Lack of ambition’ is what that says to me. And we know where that leads.
That’s kinda where my mind was headed, too. It would prove that the system is able to support a traditional parser game, but if your system is engineered to make IF, but with very different mechanics, then it might fail to replicate Cloak of Darkness, even if it’s still an IF system.
Judging a fish on its ability to climb a tree, and all that.
I mean, no one’s forcing anybody to go implement any of these things. If you find them useful, do it. If not, don’t. There’s no need to be overly literal about it.
To me, the Inform 7 examples seem like a good-sized corpus of small self-contained examples designed to show off particular features. If you want to “prove your IF system is feature complete” (whatever that means, and if it’s even a desirable goal) you could do worse than to look through this pile of things that people thought were interesting or important enough to include at the time, and decide whether they’re important to you and your system here and now.
I’ll also point out Ryan Veeder’s 2014 Craverly Heights, which is smallish and he’s said it’s ok to port it, both on the game page and in this intfiction thread. So that’s a somewhat more modern example that may or may not be interesting to you, though it’s certainly not a “standard” in any respect:
I am passionate about art that is thrown together without a lot of preparation or revision. […the game was] designed and programmed over about a week.
The narrative of the game concerns acts of extemporaneousness similar to the game’s creation, and I like to think the game creates the sense that the characters, the player, and the author all don’t really know what’s going on. So it is ironic that this game has been painstakingly recreated several times, in several different programming languages
Very true, too! I guess I don’t know what the general expectation is.
Hey, this is my new IF system. I’ve implemented Cloak of Darkness, but uh… it’s a bit tweaked. So…y’know, don’t mind the sound propagation, day-night cycle, stealth mechanics, and motion tracker. Oh, also there’s no inventory system or clothing mechanics, lol. Oh, there’s also a mission overview menu, and level select, but obviously this is just one level.
Are you describing a Twine game with definitive World model, and limited commands of NSEW, L, Z, I (Info)?
Auto inventory and puzzle solving. No need to do anything but go into various rooms. I believe there’s automap as well?
Can’t think of the title at the moment, but I’m sure somebody will correct me if I’m wrong.
I was reading this thread and thinking of a fun new standard to write (I still want to think of one and propose it, just to see if it’s any good), but honestly this game by Graham Nelson might be a better standard for a ‘serious’ IF engine:
I don’t remember everything in it, but I know it was designed as a demo to show off Inform’s features, and from copying my review is has “indistinguishable objects, games involving large numbers, magical spells that interact with each other, [and] a balance that weighs different objects”, among other things.
The specification would include:
-Have a pile of oats that you find a scroll in when you examine it
-Have a blocked exit with a custom message
-Have a spellbook with multiple spells, some of which you can memorize temporarily and others permanently
-Have a spell that copies scrolls into your spellbook
-Ridable mount taking you to other area (bozbar’d horse)
-A way to remove characters from on-stage (bozbaring the tortoise)
-A way to have a distant character you can’t interact with (flying tortoise)
-Events with random chance (the feather falling down)
-Etc. (going to stop there for now)
Oh, I was just rolling a bunch of dice and adding traits at random, lol. If someone has actually made that into a game before, then I’m interested to know how it worked out.