I had an idea for a game that could be played in any text editor.
You have a document that seemingly describes a doomed space colonization project, terraforming project, or something like that. It ends up going wrong and the civilization never extends beyond earth… the last words in the story are “we ended up ignoring space altogether.”
So you then you use find and replace to delete all the spaces. With the spaces deleted, there is another hidden instruction to change the text again.
The end result would probably be sensible to the same extent palindromes are sensible though.
There’s a whole industry of this. Starting in 2017, for a couple years, I wrote and ran one about an organization dedicated to retrieving the stolen pieces of Albert Einstein’s brain. Came with escape room-esque puzzles, etc.
I never managed to get this working in my Danish browsers. Has anyone managed to get this working in countries where English is not the official language?
You need to change the Google language to English. Easiest way to do that is to open google.com in a private window, then using the language selection at the top right of the cookie prompt.
The most ridiculously constructed adventure game that I’ve ever seen was probably westley.c from the 1994 International Obfuscated C Code Contest. See westley.hint for a closer description.
It makes assumptions about your screen width (and probably tab width as well?), and modern C compilers may print more diagnostics than the author originally intended. So I’d suggest using the -fno-diagnostics-show-caret for GCC or the -fno-caret-diagnostics option for Clang. I don’t know about other compilers.
Sample transcript:
$ gcc -fno-diagnostics-show-caret westley.c
westley.c:87:10: fatal error:
You are in a debris-filled
dungeon; a door bars the
way, and sludge trickles into
a floor drain
: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.
$ gcc -Describe -Door -fno-diagnostics-show-caret westley.c
westley.c:36:10: fatal error:
The door is decorated with relief
figures of various dog breeds
: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.
There is at least one more adventure game winning entry, and another one that uses a reimplementation of Colossal Cave as its sample input. But I didn’t find them quite as ridiculous.
I once played a game run entirely by a discord bot that had inventories & combat & stuff like that, but no narrative, and I’ve always thought it must be very doable (someone must have done it already) to tell an interactive story using a discord bot. Maybe even a cluster of them interacting with each other. The obvious thing would be to use the environment of a server to tell a super immersive social interaction story, but it could be anything. And depending on the commands available & how clear they were, it would probably feel like a parser game.
I just discovered that there have been some “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories written in the BuzzFeed quiz maker:
I would imagine anyone with a community account could create a quiz like this, unlike the branching story format they tried in 2015 that I was looking for originally, which wasn’t available to the public. (They didn’t make very many of those, but I remembered the Game of Thrones one and the Harry Potter one.)
I saw someone on Tumblr make an interactive fiction in carrd of all things: https://wizard.uwu.ai/ (although I probably shouldn’t be surprised as carrd is just like, a website editor).
on CYOA, I toyed with the idea of (ab)using the various shell window dialog systems, lone problem, the risk of generating confusion between *dialog (the most used shell dialog interface and dialogc
but there’s also zenity, whose can’t cause confusion on tool used, albeit needs a *nix/gnome environment…
I’m a customer service agent who works at home answering emails and phone calls. I’ve hopped projects a couple of times within the company. I’ve monitored live phone queues, done both internal and customer-facing chat support and was the person who wrote process documentation that nobody else had time to do. At the time I was looking at Excel going “I could make a game in this…” I was still an agent but had been tagged to back up the guy whose job it was to manage Client Reporting - I assume because I could write in complete sentences and apparently displayed comprehension to learn other apps in Microsoft Office besides Word. They skilled me up just enough in Excel and Access and PowerPoint to allow the actual Client Services Manager to take an occasional day off. Mostly it was my job to run the reports daily and send emails to client lists and the manager made it as close to “import the data and press the button” whenever possible, but I had to troubleshoot minor issues and had a few of my own ad-hoc agent monitoring and reporting tasks they asked me to devise and handle.
We got very good at it, so I often had a lot of downtime where I was the person reserved in case some issue popped up needed research no one else had time to do. Usually stuff like “which agents tend to linger in the wrap-up queue longer than necessary so they can be coached not to do that” or “can you rip apart this Excel sheet that was designed for service level to divvy up specialized outbound calls fairly between the agents who are staffed today and fix it because it’s not working right”. We even had one weird excel sheet I managed to get working that was a map of workstations and we could copy and paste an obscure-to-read list of employee IDs and phone extensions into it and it would look up employee IDs by name and show who was currently logged in at what workstation so the service level could locate individuals physically wherever they happened to sit down in the building that day.
And then just some whitespace. 324M of whitespace encoding the whole of a Inform 7 CLI package, an I7 project, and a script to compile and run said project.
To see it in action, you’d would need a VM running a Linux with a kernel < 4.11 (a necessary, but possibly insufficient condition).
