The entrance to a small personal site | Hacker News Reader

The entrance to a small personal site

t-ravis.com

149 pointsdbrereton31 comments

This thing is my fault, if anyone has questions/nits/etc.

The usual one is whether the code is somewhere. The short term answer is no, but I did pick out a name and set up a repo for anyone interested to watch, if I ever get to that point: https://github.com/abathur/roomstead

All in all, I like it.

Gameplay is missing a few niceties that you see in slightly more sophisticated games (but, I see you listed LPC as a programming language, so I assume you know that). For instance, if the visible exits are north and south, I can't 'go north'. Instead, I just have to enter 'north' as a command. Likewise, I can't 'look at' a thing; it's just 'look <thing>'. It'd also be great to be able to 'take', 'get', and 'drop' certain things.

On the plus side, I like what happens when you do 'report bug'. At one time, I also considered making a resume kind of like this, except my idea was to embed it as JS code inside a PDF document. The PDF version of the resume doesn't look very good, though. It has a mostly blank first page with just a title, header, and footer when I 'print' it on my machine.

Interesting concept, re: embedding it in a PDF.

Yes, the mechanics/mudlib are a bit sparse. It's stacked on top of a ~terminal JS library, but all of the ~MUD behavior is hand-rolled. It's a bit LP/LD-family-esque, but I've tried to completely exclude as many concepts (health, heartbeats, resets, classes, etc.) as I can get away with.

(Though, if I abstract out and publish the ~game/mudlib layers at some point, I don't think I'd be opposed to it accumulating some features beyond my own golden path.)

Bug Report: On Chrome on Windows (on my PC at least) it auto scrolls up a bit too far, cropping off the top line slightly.

Thanks for the reminder. I noticed this on Chrome on Android myself recently, but I didn't have the energy to pull on the thread at the time.

"read" should be available in addition to "look"

"read" is already used in the blog-post rooms and in a few other places for narrower interactions. It does support "glance" as a synonym for "look".

Are you aware of https://ifcomp.org/

Hmm. I don't think so. Not consciously, at least. The site feels a bit familiar, and I would probably click on a link to it if I stumbled on it elsewhere, so I may have at least seen it.

Late to the party here, but -- if you haven't checked out other interactive fiction, you definitely should! This would fit right in.

Also, btw, "examine" (or "x" for short) is a popular alternative to "look".

I did this for a website once, but I just ran it on port 23 (telnet). The "game" version had all the same information and functionality as the more mainstream-designed www site on the same host. It ran for 4 years though and not once was it found or used by a real human as far as I can tell. Made me feel like the internet was really dead. I first discovered MUDs as a child while portscanning for open SMTP servers so I could send spoofed email to my friends. It really did used to be a different experience using the net.

> I first discovered MUDs as a child while portscanning for open SMTP servers so I could send spoofed email to my friends

a growing set of Gen Alpha kids are doing the same in "metaverse"-branded online worlds, but earning a little crypto here and there from whatever they launch or interact with and use it to buy knockoff jpeg apes

maybe a lot of things make more sense with that knowledge, not a lot of people understand whats going on yet, but probably the same distribution of people that figured out children with computers were portscanning in whatever decade that was

Good analogy - portscanning and email spoofing was considered a relatively benign issue decades ago, but would be quite serious now and does lead to jail time, and I'm sure the same will be true with cryptocurrencies (unless you're in a failed state where the rule of law is a bug not a feature).

> a growing set of Gen Alpha kids are doing the same in "metaverse"-branded online worlds, but earning a little crypto here and there from whatever they launch or interact with and use it to buy knockoff jpeg apes

We really are approaching "Snow Crash" in real life

If you like this, you might also enjoy this (mobile)web friendly text game I made a while back: Dungeon Memalign[0]

[0] https://memalign.github.io/m/dungeon/index.html

Fun game! I actually liked it so much that I submitted it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30866681

The map gets a bit hard to read for the 3-emoji rooms, though. Screenshot (spoilers!): https://i.imgur.com/4yDGeN8.png

I also nearly lost because I didn't go back after getting the gold key, but that might be on me, haha.

Thank you :)

Yeah, I didn’t realize at the time that up-to-date emoji support wasn’t universal, even on the latest OS versions. The “extra” emoji are a result of your system not yet supporting some of the symbols used.

I chose emoji more carefully in my next game, a demo of the excellent interactive fiction game Counterfeit Monkey originally by Emily Short:

https://memalign.github.io/m/counterfeitmonkey/index.html

And a more jokey game of Pac-Man:

https://memalign.github.io/m/pacmandungeon/index.html

Reminds me of the promotion site for The Batman where you solve Riddler riddles.

Just checked it out again, but apparently it's been seized by Gotham police

https://www.rataalada.com/

Oh this is lovely. I forgot how much fun text-based adventures are.

I sometimes wish text adventures would still have a bit more prominence today. It's nice to see games at super-high fidelity, but these old-fashioned text adventures are so "easy" to make, they're a fantastic way to get into programming as a hobby. As a kid, learning to code was reasonably easy because it was fun; I could make games for my family and friends, and at the time I started, not much was required other than access to a pirated disk of Turbo Pascal or Q-Basic.

I remember when Mode 13h took over and things got a lot more complicated (and also fun, for those who could work it all out). Once I had mastered Mode 13h, a whole new world opened but I wondered how someone could dive into programming if that was the first hill to climb.

And then the demo scene hit me, along with hacky but exciting 3D-2D projections, from plasmas and fractals to Voxel graphics (Commanche!), and that eventually required even more complicated maths that threw me out of the game-making. I remember at the time that I couldn't wait to "grow up" and reach a stage in school where they'd teach me the maths necessary to keep up with the requirements of game design at the time. I never returned to it, unfortunately.

Text adventures were a fantastic and light-weight way into all of it. Every time I try to convince a kid to try and make one, they struggle to get excited about it. They want to make Minecraft and Fortnite, and I don't even know where to begin to explain. So, yeah. Time to learn Unity.

For anyone curious to travel back in time over Christmas or so, here's a bit about Mode 13h: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_13h

And here's a nice book on Game Design of that era, around the infamous Wolfenstein 3D: https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbwolf3d.pdf

> I sometimes wish text adventures would still have a bit more prominence today.

Text adventures are still alive. Its just called Interactive Fiction now. There's also a whole bunch of modern (often open source) tools available to create them.

Competitions: https://ifcomp.org/comp/2021

IFDB: https://ifdb.org/

Tools: https://itsfoss.com/create-interactive-fiction/

I have a small game to enter my site too, though mine is Twine based:

https://shantnutiwari.com/

Reminds me of a text-based MMO called Alter Aeon (http://www.alteraeon.com).

awesome - was thinking of doing something similar but for an ARG

I wish I could try `get flask`.

I think the syntax is 'get ye flask'

You can't get ye flask.

Well played, sir. Well played.

Crap I was eaten by a grue

very nice

Where are the orcs?

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