Creating text adventures allows a designer to abstract away a lot of graphical and physics-based complexity to focus on the world they want to build and the puzzles they want the player to interact with.

1. Andre Odendaal
@Fengol
April 2019
Prototyping with Text
Adventures and MUDs

2. Agenda
• Historical Context
• Colossal Cave Adventure – Dimensional Abstraction
• Zork - Puzzles
• MUDs – Shared Experience
• Z-Machine and Inform7
• Interactive Fiction Competition

3. Historical Context - 1975
• Microsoft founded (spelt Micro-Soft)
• Viking 1, first probe to Mars, launched
• Heavy metal band Iron Maiden formed
• Atari releases the home version of Pong
• Altair 8800 build-it-yourself microcomputer sold (could run BASIC)

4. The 1st Adventure
• Colossal Cave Adventures created in 1975
• Written in FORTRAN for PDP-10 mainframe & used 330kB
• Maps a simulation of Bedquilt Cave in US state of Kentucky
“You are standing at the end of a road before a
small brick building.
Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of
the building and down a gully.”

5. Dimensional Abstraction
• North, South, East, West
• Up, Down
• Inside, Outside
• Create custom directions

6. Navigation Demo

7. Zork
• Made in 1977 (originally called Dungeon)
• Written in MDL (MIT Design Language) for PDP-10
• Exploring maze-like and solving item-based puzzles. Enemies were
puzzles
• Play now http://zorkonline.net
“You are standing in an open field west of a white
house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.”

8. Puzzles
• Item based
• Action based
• Enemies are puzzles

9. https://fengol.itch.io/text-adventure-puzzle
Puzzle Demo

10. MUDs
• MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) later Essex MUD or MUD1 created in
1978 written in MACRO-10 for DEC PDP-10
• SHADES created in 1985 because MUD1 would shutdown during
holidays
• Lots of variants established:
• Hack ‘n Slash
• PvP
• Roleplaying
• Social

11. Shared Experiences
• The Cybergypsies: a True Tale of
Lust, War, and Betrayal on the
Electronic Frontier
• IRC created in 1988
• World of Warcraft released in US
in 2004

12. MUD Demo
telnet game.guncho.com 4108
type: @teleport CasualDungeon

13. Z-Machine
• Virtual machine developed by Infocom
• Inform developed in 1993 by Graham Nelson
• Latest is Inform 7 http://inform7.com
• Z-Machine standard developed in 1997
• Available on modern platforms:
• Zoom – Mac OS
• Frotz – Multiple platforms
• Frotz for iOS
• ZMachine.NET - .NET
• Zax - Java

14. Inform7 Demo

15. Interactive Fiction Competition
• Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction runs annual interactive fiction
competition
• http://ifcomp.org
• Prizes are donated by public and entries must be freeware or public
domain

16. Conclusion
DIMENSIONAL
ABSTRACTION
PUZZLES SHARED EXPERIENCE