What goes around, comes around. The story so far:
In 1999 I released my first game, “Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina.” It’s an old-school parser-based puzzle-fest, written in Inform 6. Sadly, at some point I lost track of the source code. For 27 years it has been impossible to fix the remaining bugs.
A few weeks ago it occurred to me to wonder if I could use AI to deconstruct the original .z8 game file and port everything over to Inform 7/10 so I can maintain the game. Thanks to some sage advice by Jeff Nyman, Anthropic Claude has been able to do exactly that. Along the way, Claude detected and fixed more than 50 bugs, many of them minor but three or four of them quite serious.
It’s entirely possible, though, that Claude has introduced new bugs. AIs make mistakes. So I’m hoping to enlist a couple of intrepid beta-testers to put the game through its paces. A word of warning: It’s large.
If you played Ballerina many years ago, you might enjoy re-encountering it. If you never played it, now’s your chance! It’s equipped with a full set of hints and a built-in walkthrough, but there are rather a lot of insidious puzzles, including a couple that are displayed using ASCII monospace “art.” For that reason, blind players will likely find it difficult.
If you’d like to sign up, send me a DM or an email to midiguru23@sbcglobal.net.