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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

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PaulHoule·

Scott Adams wrote a simple interpreter which could be implemented in BASIC or Assembly Language for his games.

https://6502disassembly.com/a2-scott-adams/interp.html

This was like the Infocom interpreter (e.g. "Zork") but more specialized to writing games.

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Yes that is correct! I had a lot of fun inventing it and was able to do some interesting things with it. Every adventiure game I wrote I tried to do something different that I hadn't done before.

The Z-Machine was made for games, too. And the then new Inform6 game was basically literal OOP with rooms, objects and people, thus making an adventure can be done in really trivial ways.

If you read up Inform's Beginner Guide you'll get amazed of how the Inform6 library handles lots of stuff for you. Lots of verbs and objects types are already implemented, so you can set a game "room" for example in just four words split into two lines.

Nowadays there's also PunyInform, an Inform 6 library that replaces the standard library. Programming for it is very similar, but the resulting games are much smaller and faster, to work well on 8-bit computers. https://github.com/johanberntsson/PunyInform

There's currently a jam going on. Three PunyInform games have been released, and anyone can play and judge them at https://itch.io/jam/punyjam-2/entries . One of the games (Opportunity) comes with source code too, so you can see how it works, if you're interested.

Yeah, I know Punyinform too, I already tried some game under Vice (C64 emu).

I am curious about Tristan Island, it looks like a decent game for an v3 Z-machine.

It is! I'm about halfway through it. $4 is a bargain. Just get it.

A link for anyone who cares: https://hlabrande.itch.io/tristam-island

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