Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’m calling it here. My previous posts on Keys of the Wizard are needed for context.

The main issue I ran across: what probably are serious bugs. Why “probably”: the nature of this game makes it hard to tell what is a bug or not. Let me explain in context–

Via World of Dragon.

–so I booted up difficulty 3, saved my game, and started by systematically annotating my map with the locations of enemies and items. Both can move around (the Jester, for instance, moves items) but not significantly. This let me decide on an action plan.

I tried some “clever” methods but in the end the easiest thing to do was to scrawl upon my existing map with Microsoft Paint.

I noticed, while I was going through the process above, that difficulty 3 had more traps to deal with. One room starts shrinking, one has poison darts…

…and the room that had a statue I previously thought might have some sort of secret, turned out to also be a trap; if you enter the room from below it attacks you and takes out a chunk of damage.

This turns out to be much more worrisome at difficulty 3 than 1, as the monsters … well, they don’t hit for more per hit, but they last for longer, meaning they have more time to get hits in. The overall effect of combat really is like a typing game and since you can do more damage when healthy, if you can very quickly type in many hits at the start you’ll be at an advantage.

Notice how I was in the middle of typing “BASH ORC” but got interrupted at “BA”. No, you can’t keep going and type “SH ORC”, you have to start over from the beginning. I got good at typing CYCLOPS fast.

The game features a REST mechanic, with the catch that monsters will wander while you are resting and might whale upon you if they come across you. If you go to the Sanctuary at the start, this normally isn’t a problem, with one exception: the Wizard can teleport in.

This means, theoretically, if you could kill the Wizard, you’d be safe the rest of the game. You might think that means the game has locked the means of killing the wizard behind a whole sequence of events. Certainly the unicorn hints are more lengthy to deal with this time:

lantern + mask + feather -> deathring
dagger + feather + rope -> machete
plectrum + dagger + lantern -> manacle
spoon + plectrum + rope -> map
tome + rope + feather -> lance
tome + lantern + mask -> dragonsword
rope + lantern + feather -> jug
dagger + feather + rope -> machete
lantern + feather + rope -> scroll

(The same trick that works on Minotaur works here. When you find a unicorn, save, step east, go north X times, go west, and RUB HORN. You will get a hint. Repeat for X+1, you will get a different hint. Repeat for X+2 etc. until all hints are obtained.)

However, I realized the PISTOL and the BULLET that goes with it were pretty easy to get through the way my map was generated…

Bullet is the star on the left, pistol is the star on the right. This isn’t quite as straight a shot as it looks because the first one-way door requires having used the PLECTRUM on the ZITHER in order to open it, but it still isn’t hard to grab both items.

…so I decided to make a beeline for those items first, then try the pistol out on various enemies to see which ones I could insta-assassinate. The answer is none of them. I did between either 0 or 3 points of damage (out of 255).

The orc is the easiest enemy to fight in the game. Here I did 1 point of damage.

The fact that two items need to be united for all this to work makes the effect seem baffling and was one of the points that I suspect might be a bug. (Or maybe the pistol is only super-effective if you’re holding other item X at the same time?)

I decided to switch to the old reliable, the mace. That did work although it does somewhere 30 damage max (when you aren’t hurt) down to 10 (when you’re just a little hurt). So it requires chipping away at enemies, but all the enemies do roughly the same damage back no matter if they’re an orc or a dragon. Or a wizard.

With the wizard dead, things worked as I expected: going back to the Sanctuary and using REST let me wait out my health rising all the way back to 255 with no opposition. Based on the manual, there’s no particular limit to how often you can use REST (there’s items that protect you from enemy attack with a limit, but that’s not the same thing as just trying to use the action). The problem is, even though I could restore essentially an unlimited number of health points, I could only do it once; going back to the Sanctuary later and using REST again had my health go up 0. This feels more like a bug than intentional to me.

(Aside: going north from the Sanctuary on difficulty 3 works differently than on 1. On easy mode it teleports you back to the starting cabin; on difficulty 3 it teleports you to some random spot on the top floor. I found that the hedge maze area was not available in the route I had taken before, and the only way I could get in was via Sanctuary teleportation.)

I next tried making the JUG my initial priority. The JUG is on the list of items where you need other items first to do pickup (rope + lantern + feather); the items are in the open although it was a pain to wrangle all three and get to the right spot. Finally:

The jug has rum which heals you, but alas, it only works once; subsequent drinks are poison. Oh well.

Thinking some more, I decided to go for the DRAGONSWORD instead. Surely that’s a good weapon and will be more efficient than the mace?

tome + lantern + mask -> dragonsword

This is a more elaborate combination to get than the jug, because the mask is held by the cyclops. So I had to nab the mace, then club the cyclops, and then get the mask, tome and lantern together. Holding four inventory objects at the same time also requires some good health so I had to avail myself of the options I had (teleports still do healing, so I used one of those, plus I got zapped to the hedge maze once with a food ration and I used that). Finally:

I was excited to see at least the dragon fall before me in a flurry of blows, but no: the sword does zero damage, no matter what enemy I used it on or attack verb I tried.

Surely this is a bug?

Hence, that complicated sequence was for nothing: the best thing to do was to grab the mace which was already out in the open and use that for braining services instead. I suspect something went awry with the game’s tables.

I tried fiddling with the keys in lots of places, but never got them to do anything, sorry. I also found one of the unicorn’s hints told me objects I needed to pick up the Cyclops’s eye (which it drops upon dying) but I was able to pick it up just fine without any extra help.

I never even saw the dust.

If I had faith the game was behaving like it was supposed to I might try a little bit longer, but no, this is a good stopping point. I think I’ve extracted most of the “wisdom” anyway, so let me segue into a discussion of the adventure-roguelike.

It has been tried quite a few times now, and never with great success. In historical terms, I think the main issue was (unlike Adventure itself, or RPGs glomming onto Wizardry/Ultima) there wasn’t a good model to copy. I don’t think any of the authors even heard of each other, so they were all re-inventing their own personal wheels with their strengths and weaknesses. Mines to kick things off had very tight logic in terms of object and puzzle placement, but given that was the only real element to the game it became mechanical as a story. Lugi seemed promising, but puzzle solving was hard to do systematically. Minotaur did a good job making the map seem varied even when it was fixed but had to go a route frustrating design to even work (when Keys of the Wizard tried to tone down the frustrating design — most especially by ditching the magic system — it created a gaping hole where gameplay was supposed to go).

The Queen of Phobos got the closest I’ve seen to what might be the “ideal”, except it had too much fixed to really count as a full adventure-roguelike. Still:

a.) the game has four thieves you have to deal with

b.) each thief has a weakness that can be used to defeat it (like beer for one)

c.) alternately, there’s a grenade you can throw to take down any thief…

d.) …or even better, if two thieves are in the same room, you can take down two at the same time.

e.) If all else fails, you can cross your fingers and try your best to evade them.

I don’t think the key here is just multiple options, but multiple options which have different natures than just “solving the puzzle”. The beer option works well as long as you give it to the right enemy…

THE LOOTER IS HIGHLY INSULTED AND KILLS YOU. THEY MUST NOT DRINK BEER WHERE HE COMES FROM.

…but because the grenade can hit two enemies at once, it isn’t precisely symmetrical to using the beer (compare with solving a puzzle vs. using a wish in Wishbringer). Evading also results in a much different gameplay effect than either of the other two options.

So I’ll say a good adventure-roguelike will offer multiple solutions to puzzles but do it in such a way that the ramifications of how the solve is enacted results in different world-states. One solution to a problem might involve explosives but cause damage elsewhere (and a brand-new problem) while a subtler approach might avoid structural damage but corrupt the player’s mind with dark power which comes into play later. With enough “ramification effects” two playthroughs would end up being very different; the player themselves would be used as a source of chaos. While this isn’t the only thing needed to make such a game work, I’ve never seen it used systematically in combination with full randomization and I suspect it might make the genre a little more plausible.

(My previous posts on this game are needed for context.)

I think I’ve squeezed most of the juice out of Easy difficulty level, even though I haven’t finished; I’m going to try upping to Hard and make at least one more post.

I did manage to fix the main thing that was bothering me, the empty gap on the top level map. I’ll show that off first:

There was no puzzle involved: in the room leading to that area, I simply missed an exit. The bizarre constantly-changing exit descriptions really do make it hard to keep track. The main feature to the area is a hedge maze, which is “classical” Adventure-style; that is, it is the kind of maze where I needed to drop items to map it out and a node-based representation (as above). The only extra twist is that upon going through the maze’s exit, sometimes it teleports the player back into the maze; this is just like the maze area on the middle floor.

The maze leads to three rooms representing a library, and a one-way exit back to the regular portion of the map I was at before.

I have not caused anything special to happen here. It may be just decoration.

There was one other a gap, a single-room missing chunk on the bottom floor…

…but I think I have that one accounted for as well. The top and middle floors are now all filled, and the Sanctuary — the room that you go up from the top floor to in order to drop treasures — needs to be placed somewhere amongst the three floors according to the game’s logic. So I’m fairly confident the Sanctuary is filling that gap (meaning I can stop trying to dig down, hit the adjacent walls with a mattock, etc.)

Just like Minotaur, if you’re holding too many items you can’t go up, and the game communicates this by just repeating the room description.

Other than that, the game has been mostly tedious. The problem is that most of the mechanics are ripped out. Getting hints from the unicorn, I found

you need a ROPE to get a SCROLL
you need a FOOD to get a MACHETE
you need a TOME to get the DRAGONSWORD
you need FOOD to get the DEATHRING

and I even got a screenshot of both the hint and its ramification right next to each other, by luck:

However, on Easy none of those items seem to be important. You do not need the DRAGONSWORD to kill the DRAGON. In fact, the MACE (one of the first weapons I found, just out in the open) kills everything including both the dragon and wizard in three hits.

No special item from the Wizard, the map sometimes is out on the open on the top floor.

The only enemy I left standing was the Jester, who appears, laughs a bit, and disappears before I can finish typing BASH JESTER. It sometimes randomly picks up items and moves them elsewhere but doesn’t attack. I can say I reached the same state I “won” Minotaur at last time (killing all the imminent threats) so let’s see what Hard has to offer.

The gaps in Easy really did undercut the game mechanics significantly; the whole idea of chains of objects needed from Minotaur is gone. As far as I can tell there are no magic spells either like in Minotaur (even on Hard!) It may be just the author decided the original game was too fiddly (which is, to be honest, fair) but the fiddly parts are what made the game work.

Even if I don’t have any significant difference playing on Hard (just making something up: now instead of 1 teleport spot there are 3 of them) I’ll spend one more post on Keys as I want to do wrap-up on the adventure-roguelike concept as a whole. This represents more or less the last game in the category from 1982 (barring a certain famous game from Australia, but it gets its own long discussion) and my impression is the genre starts to peter out starting in 1983. (Not completely! But enthusiasm for games like Madness and the Minotaur starts to wane.) There’s been some recent interest trying to use “AI” to generate maps but people attempting to do so run into the same problems that people in 1982 were running into, so I think it’s a useful discussion both for historical study and modern design.

L. Curtis Boyle, Rob, and Strident all helped with finding an earlier ad for the game than in my first post. From 80 Micro, May 1982.

Thanks to L. Curtis Boyle and Rob in the comments, I now have the “box” art and manual for the earlier (Spectral Associates) version of the game.

From Ye Olde Infocom Shoppe, which I found out also has items listed on Bonanza.

It looks like the manual is nearly identical, except for one important difference: it lists specifically what attack verbs are:

SHOOT, STAB, HACK, BASH

The idea, again, is that you READY the weapon in question (you cannot have inventory otherwise, so any items are dropped if you ready something) and then use the appropriate verb. It does seem like some weapons are more appropriate for particular creatures than others.

DAGGER, MATTOCK, DRAGON SWORD, PISTOL, MACE, SCIMITAR, MACHETTE, LANCE

My first real combat was unintentional. I had the game running in the background as I was checking the map and manual over and when I came back the wizard had arrived and done me in (this is at the very start of the game, so it appears the wizard can go everywhere except maybe the Sanctuary).

My second combat wasn’t a real one, because I ran across the dragon all I had was a dagger (which did nothing). I’ll show off the maps later; the dragon lair is quite early in rather than buried, but it can also be fairly easily avoided.

A quick extra comment on the text above: I was trying to see if ATTACK DRAGON had any effect (it doesn’t, but I didn’t have the list of four attacks from the earlier manual so I didn’t know that). I started typing the letters “AT” and was interrupted by the dragon. I’ve had cases where I’ve had a command interrupted where I just had to re-type it in, which means you’re in a literal typing match versus the computer.

Fortunately, at difficulty level 1, monsters really don’t hurt that much (unless you leave the game idling for an hour so the wizard can whomp you in the starting room). Here I am with a MACE using the BASH verb on a cyclops who barely gave me a scratch:

COND (condition) went from 255 to 239. The cyclops also left a treasure, the EYE OF THE CYCLOPS.

Later I bashed an orc which did a little more damage, but nothing to worry terribly about:

The main worry is while exploring, you sometimes meet an enemy before you are ready (given the inventory limit of the game is low just like Minotaur, I often didn’t have a weapon at hand), so need to make a prudent exit. However, it is possible to just zip by. I assume at difficulty level 3 this will all be much more of a hassle.

Notice my casual stroll by the wizard.

With the combat out of the way for now, let’s go over the map. I think I have nearly all of it, because multiple places tout the game as having “over 200” rooms and I’m at 197. This is not as large as Madness and the Minotaur; assuming I’m not missing something major, there’s only three floors, and each floor is eight by eight.

To make it easier to visualize, I’ve rendered it like an RPG map. It is no doubt incomplete (see the big gap on the top floor, for instance) and I don’t expect I’m 100% accurate (especially on one-way door locations, it was easy to walk through a corridor and miss the fact the way back was closed off).

Top floor:

S is the starting point, and the “ridges” are places you can jump over. The stair in the northwest corner also goes up to the Sanctuary where the treasures are stored.

Middle floor:

The arrows represent “landing points” for stairs which are one-way. The upper right 4×4 portion is a “maze” with a randomized stair, where the stair has a chance of sending the player back in the maze instead of going up.

Bottom floor:

The “dead end” leads to a Temple of Apollo where going south leads to a room on the second floor.

Just to illustrate the 3D-ness of the game, here’s a sample path from the start all the way to the northeast corner of the top floor (where there is an EMPTY CAVE):

The red side path leads to the dragon’s lair.

Along the way I had to jump a chasm…

…and solve a minor puzzle where a zither in a room could be played with a PLECTRUM (the use of this is given by a hint in both versions of the manual).

The route as shown otherwise relatively straightforward on the save file I was using, but I do again want to emphasize I’m at a lower difficulty and more things are supposed to potentially happen, and even at level 1 random traps can pop up. On one of my runs, a particular spot on the middle floor had a teleport trap which I was never able to disarm:

There are multiple places with boxes that suggest some kind of treasure, but I have yet to be able to open one. I might just not be holding the right key in the right place.

The spot I find most intriguing is at the SE corner of the top floor. To get there you need to jump over a chasm where it is possible to die if you are holding too much:

I don’t know what the limit is. This is being done at full health, so that isn’t an issue.

Here’s the actual room in the southeast corner:

The wood door leads “off the map” but could easily be a teleport, maybe to the empty section on level 1. However, I haven’t been able to get in the door; I assume another key is involved? Or possibly, there’s an arbitrary use of a magic item (which would be hard to test, given the chasm prevents carrying too much).

There are many other rooms which could potentially have something going on, but it’s not obvious what item I’m supposed to be using or magic I’m supposed to cast. There’s FAIRY DUST, for instance, and the verb SPRINKLE, but where should it go? Does it even get used at difficulty level 1? I also tried checking carefully every room underneath the gap in level 1 just in case there was something special, and this statue at a dead end looks suggestive…

…but given many of the rooms are just described for flavor, the statue may mean nothing at all.

This trumpet can be played, but I haven’t found anywhere where it has an effect.

To summarize, the various mysteries are

• The large gap on the map of the top floor and the single room missing on the bottom floor
• The reference to a “HIDDEN TEMPLE” mentioned on the OLD MAP
• The contents of any of the locked boxes and how to open them
• The wooden door past the deadly chasm

Plus, of course, any “ordinary” locations might randomly hold secrets.

Is there a way to read the carvings, maybe?

I think I’m ready to do a “fixed” run where I’ll save my game and notate where all the objects are (staying with difficulty 1 for now). I’ll likely need to abuse the unicorn RNG just like Madness and the Minotaur (assuming that trick still even works!) Also (again like Minotaur) I’ll need to take many trips to get objects to the right places as the inventory limit is tight. Unlike that game you don’t have to deal with a constant state of decay, no matter which difficulty level you play at. Your condition only goes down upon being hit by monsters; on difficulty 3 the monsters start to hit faster.

Our journey through adventures with significant randomization, or as I’ve termed them, adventure-roguelikes, has been seriously bumpy.

To be clear, not every randomization is “significant”; random wanderings of the dwarves and pirates in Adventure don’t affect the underlying gameplay at a fundamental level, and it is still possible to play with a traditional walkthrough. Mines, on the other hand, has the map and puzzle placement generated anew for each game, and The 6 Keys of Tangrin had a generator so out-of-control it was possible to land in a map consisting of two rooms.

Lugi is maybe the best representative for one of these games that includes map-randomization. That game also hit what I think is the big disjoint that makes RPG-roguelikes work where adventure-roguelikes struggle; RPGs tend to have multiple routes to accomplishing things, while adventures often have specific solutions in mind. It means in an adventure while puzzle X might require item A, you might just never find item A and be stuck; while futile searching for a desired item can happen in Nethack, usually there’s some kind of substitute strategy to muddle through an obstacle (if nothing else, you can hope to luck out).

Madness and the Minotaur from Spectral Associates uses the strategy of not randomizing the basic elements of the map…

It always has this 3d layout, where the grey cubes represent the maze.

…but rather making it so the monster-and-object-and-trap placement cause sufficient issues to feel like there is a random “overlay”. This is a decent strategy for an adventure, as you’re essentially playing two games at once: the specific game you’ve rolled up, and the meta-game of elements that will stay consistent between attempts. This makes every attempt feel like “progress”. Mapping in a game like The 6 Keys of Tangrin always felt particularly fruitless and robotic, far more than the random dungeon of an RPG (which you generally don’t have to put in work in map creation); by having a consistent map yet random elements this issue gets avoided.

Tom [Rosenbaum] loved to play adventure games but was disappointed in the computer adventure games that were out there because they had no replay ability. Once you solved them, playing again was exactly the same. Tom also liked board games like Civilization, and decided that a computer game with the randomness and unpredictability of games like this would be something he would enjoy playing over and over.

While Tom Rosenbaum wrote Madness and the Minotaur, the sequel, Keys of the Wizard, was written by his employee Tom Gabbard:

The first program I wrote for Spectral was Keys of the Wizard. I use the term “wrote” very loosely, because the underlying code was from Madness and the Minotaur and most of the “writing” I did was in the form of map changes, dictionary changes and room description changes. There were a few code changes and additions that changed the way battling creatures worked, and that gave a few of the creatures the ability to “catch your scent” and follow you, but it was mostly Madness code.

The earliest ad I’ve seen for the game is from an August 1982 issue of The Rainbow. I’ve never seen a copy of that ’82 version. What I have seen is the version printed by Microdeal from the UK starting in 1984. They made both a Tandy Color Computer version as well as one for the Dragon (the clone-computer from Wales). I’ll be playing the version for Dragon.

Via World of Dragon.

Despite Mr. Gabbard claiming there wasn’t much change with Minotaur, there’s one significant one off the start: this game has difficulty levels.

1 is for the “novice player” where “only a few treasures are hidden, the creatures are easy to defeat and only a few special tricks are active”. Difficulty 3 has “all the treasures” hidden with “very dangerous” creatures and “all the special tricks and traps are active”. I’m starting with difficulty 1 (as recommended by the instructions) and then I’ll ramp up to 3 later to see what changes.

The reference to hidden treasures is ominous. I remember this being one of the fiddliest parts of Minotaur, with acts as random as dropping a lantern in a particular place (which would change during the game) revealing a treasure. I am hoping this isn’t going to devolve into the sort of thing where I try every plausible action in every room just because there’s no hints where an event might happen.

Here’s two renditions of the opening room (level 1):

The room description is consistent in both cases (again, this is a fixed map). The direction descriptions randomize, and they randomize on the spot; if you look at the room again one time you may see THERE IS A TRAIL TO THE SOUTH and another time it may be A DIRT TRAIL WINDS SOUTH and on yet another it may be A TWISTING PATH LEADS SOUTH. The room description repeats if you walk in a wall but it repeats with the exit-description change listed above, so traversing the game can feel a touch surreal.

In the first variation there was a pool of water but no objects; in the second there were two treasures here right off the start (bag of pearls, small silver spoon). The treasures don’t go at the start but rather a location called the Sanctuary so it doesn’t give starting points just for lucky RNG. The goal of the game is to rescue 32 treasures and bring them to the Sanctuary (I don’t know if the game gives points for killing creatures, or if their lack of hitting the player is a reward unto itself).

The CYC-TRL-BAT-etc. along the top with 255 next to each represent the creatures of the game. It gives consistently at all times what their condition is and if it reaches 0 that creature is dead. The full list (from the manual) is

CYCLOPS, ORC, DRAGON, BAT, TROLL, WIZARD, JESTER, UNICORN

The ORC and DRAGON follow the player (see the “catch your scent” mechanic the author mentioned), the jester is a “trickster” (stealing items, maybe?) and the unicorn will give hints if you RUB HORN; I suppose the unicorn is this game’s oracle. (In Madness and the Minotaur, the way I finally started making progress was manipulating the oracle’s RNG to cycle through every possible hint.)

While I’m quoting manual things I should mention the weapons list…

DAGGER, MATTOCK, DRAGON SWORD, PISTOL, MACE, SCIMITAR, MACHETTE, LANCE

…and the verb list.

BASH, GET, LOOK, RUB, BURY, HACK, OPEN, SPRINKLE, DROP, INV, PLAY, SHOOT, DIG, JUMP, PUSH, STAB, DRINK, KICK, QUIET, TOSS, EAT, LEAP, READ, UNCLE, EXAMINE, LOAD, READY, UNLOCK, FILL, REST

QUIET pauses the game (this is in real time, so if you step away from the computer you might have a monster wander in and whomp you). UNCLE quits and allows a restart; READY is used to wield a weapon.

REST is a special mechanic for recovering strength, and it causes the monsters to “move 60 times their normal speed and recuperate at 12 times that of normal”. The “tome”, “necklace”, and “medallion” are magic items that can help wake you if a monster walks in. Of the three items one is chosen at random at the start to appear “and will be used during the entire adventure.”

I’d give the lore, too, but there doesn’t appear to be any; there’s a wizard, you need to get treasure, now go forth. Minotaur had a little lore so that makes one difference between the games, the other one being a de-emphasis on magic. There was a list of spells with lots of various effects in the original manual that don’t show up here; I don’t know if that means any magic is more item-oriented here or the manual is just being cryptic intentionally.

The game is in the same rectilinear format as before; here’s the map of the first floor without taking any down-exits:

I’m dutifully marking down the room names though it’s hard to tell how useful they’ll be with this sort of game. Can the “broken chariot” mention in the unicorn screenshot earlier be used, somehow? (If so, based on Minotaur, it’ll be an indication some random object gets used there.) At the very least the Wizard’s Hidden Temple seems like it must be significant because of a “golden box”:

The game says I can’t when trying to open the box. It might need the right key (I’ve found a DIAMONDKEY on one run but that wasn’t it) or maybe it only responds to the right sort of magic.

The upper left corner of the map lets you go up as well as down. Going up leads to the “sanctuary” which is where the treasures go; heading north from the sanctuary loops the player back to the cottage at the start.

So far on the first floor I’ve only met the jester (who just appeared and disappeared) and the unicorn, whose clues follow roughly the same format as Minotaur (“to get X you need Y”). I assume the danger starts when I go diving down, although in one case the diving was unintentional:

Even on difficulty level 1 this has traps! The triggers were rather complicated in Minotaur so I expect the same here.

An old map with a hint. I haven’t found it twice so I don’t know yet if the hint changes.

Next time, I’ll report in from level 2 and beyond. Based on the gaps I’m already seeing I expect once again I’m going to have to think of the overall geography in three dimensions.