Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my last post.)

If I went by raw voting (including the people who messaged me outside of the comments) I have had slightly more people ask for Tandy CoCo than Apple II. What ended up happening is

(a.) I went with CoCo, struggled, and got to a point where I was impossibly stuck

(b.) I switched to Apple II to see if anything was different, found only one difference, was still impossibly stuck

Part (b.), other than splitting the baby as Ahab suggested in the comments, is a general strategy I use when stuck on anything (not just solving adventure game puzzles) where I re-attempt the same task with different context to see if anything new pops out. In the case of adventures, there might be different text, but in the absence of that, I might just type commands in a different sequence or happen to find I made a mapping mistake. Potentially, my brain has a new insight just from the slight change in context.

I don’t think my issue is a mapping mistake even though the entire game so far has been a maze. It’s more the parser is putting up a unique struggle, where something in nearly every game so far, even the bad-parser ones, I’d have gotten a response. Just to avoid hiding the lede:

There’s a pool with … water. You don’t think that, given you’ve been repeating emphatically that the player is thirsty, that they might try to drink it? Or if they have a canteen they fill with water from the pool in case there’s some weird quirk there, that they might to drink out of that?

This adventure has an extensive vocabulary. It may take some experimentation to discover the correct command to use in certain situations.

Thanks, manual. Anyway, to rewind:

We start in what looks like an open desert. It is not an open desert. It is a fairly finicky maze. This was non-trivial to get over — I’m used to desert mazes always having some open-grid sense to them even if they get maze-like on the edges (like the trackless desert in Adventure Quest).

You don’t have any items to start — there’s one just north that you can dig up but you don’t start with a shovel — and the map is oriented so that many of the exits return you to the start room. I got through by testing out “let’s try going repeatedly E, reset, go repeatedly S, reset, etc.” and found there was a new room by going north three times.

I tried constructing a map from there, realizing that I was likely in a single column, and answering the question “how many steps north to reach the new room?” would tell me where I was at any moment.

(You might remember in my Apple II animated shot I had a shovel. I got that randomly when trying to get a good GIF file and couldn’t re-create my steps. At least it let me know the solution was purely wander-based. This is another manifestation of the “play in a different context to break something” method.)

The “down” and “west” exits lead to two different branches of desert. I started with the down branch in my gameplay but the west branch is the more useful one sequentially, so let’s go that way first.

The green exits go back to the starting room.

This specifically leads to the previously seen shovel, which means you can start using to help map out rooms. And of course, digging — digging everywhere. An Egypt-archaeology-desert is the one case I don’t feel weird about that, and even marking every room as I make sure to type DIG in it to find a new item. Ludic gameplay matching the story environment. For example, just north of the starting room there is a torch, but since I’m not in any dark places yet, I can’t use it (although it can help with the mapping).

The one non-visual difference between the Apple and CoCo versions I mentioned is that “you are thirsty” messages start triggering earlier on the CoCo.

North of the shovel is a snake. You can HIT SNAKE / WITH SHOVEL and it turns into snake oil. A bit east you can find a canteen, and fill it with the snake oil, but I haven’t found a use for it.

Taking the other branch in the desert:

At the “base of a cliff” area you can dig up a “magnifier” (50-50 on if it gets used to set fires or used to study tiny hieroglyphs) and find an “old rope”, but taking the rope causes it to fall apart.

Finally you can loop round to the accursed pool, which I’ll show off again, this time in Apple II format.

Leaving aside the impossibility of drinking the water, you can dive in to find a cover, described as having a handle.

Yes, more parser trouble. I’m almost willing to accept the cover needs a tool hence the parser not being helpful and saying “it’s stuck beyond your ability to move with your own strength” but who would code a game with a thirst daemon and not expect the player to drink the first water they see? Argh!

One thing I haven’t done yet is make my verb table, but I was trying to approach this game like a “normal player” first, since it isn’t like most people are going to have a list of words accumulated over 10+ years in order to play. I can’t imagine people in 1982 were too pleased about the situation.

(Oh, did I mention I still don’t know what command to use to get out of the pool? “Some experimentation” to communicate. Right.)