A little earlier this year, Shaun McClure released a new book titled How to design adventure games. You can read more about it on the forum here.
The book contains data for a sample game called John’s Quest. I was recently helping someone to implement this game in Adventuron. It was sometimes hard to answer questions without knowing the context, so I ported John’s Quest to PunyInform. As I’d already bought the book and downloaded the data files, it only took about 3 days to do the port. In doing so, I quickly realised that this was a fun little game, but it had quite a few red herrings, parts of the game could be skipped over and there were things in the original design that Shaun had dismissed as being too hard to implement. So, I spent an extra 3 or 4 days extending the game so that the red herrings were either deleted or had a purpose and the things that were too hard to implement were implemented. The overall game is still true to Shaun’s design, but because of the extensions, I renamed it to The Woodcutter’s Quest.
I then asked Shaun if it was okay to publish this and use one of his images for the cover screen. Quite to my surprise, he was more than supportive. To quote:
That’s fantastic. Yes, of course - the guide was meant to inspire so it’s nice to see that you took the original and improved it in such a way. Use it as you will with my full blessing! And you are free to use any artwork in the book too. It was nice of you to check with me though!
So, I’m now looking for beta testers. It’s a classic text adventure where you play the part of John, the woodcutter. When you were out woodcutting one day, you heard screams in the distance. When you went to investigate, you found that your village had been largely destroyed by an evil wizard who was rumoured to have moved into a deserted castle across the valley. All the villagers have been taken, so you set out to kill the wizard and rescue the villagers.
If you’d like to test this, send me a personal message and I’ll send you the link and password. For the moment, it’s just a downloadable z5 file, so you’ll need a Z-code interpreter or you can play it online at iplayif.com. I’ll pretty up the project page and add a browser-playable version before making it public.
As always, I’m happy to trade testing.
If you’ve already bought Shaun’s book, you might find this fun to play before implementing it yourself in your authoring system of choice OR it may inspire you to buy Shaun’s book, so I’ve given the book a bit of a plug on the project page.
EDIT: I’ve prettied up the project page and added a browser-playable version if you prefer to play online.
