*If you are looking to play my Text Adventures, scroll down. Otherwise, read on Adventurer…*
I used to play Text Adventures on Spectrum, usually with one of my mates from school. We had our favourites – The Very Big Cave Adventure, The Hobbit and one game I got free on a copy of Your Sinclair (I think) where you had to get out of a locked toilet. I had a go at making a few text adventures too – my Dad brought home a copy of The Quill one evening. It was on a generic C15 cassette so there was no manual, but I didn’t let lack of knowledge stop me from having a go. Within a few hours I had a “game” where you started off in a bedroom, but if you went North you ended up in the upstairs landing. That was it. It was never going to win any awards, but I was proud of my two room “game” and spent about an hour typing “N” to go to the landing, waiting a bit, then typing “S” to return to the bedroom.
Jump to 2018 and I’m sat at home, a bit bored, looking for something to do online. I find out about Adventuron, a free online programming environment that allows people to make their own Text Adventures. Intrigued, I watch the 45 minute tutorial on YouTube and follow along in Adventuron, and within the hour I had written a fully working, standalone text adventure. This was incredible! I genuinely was amazed how easy it had been. So I had a go at creating a Text Adventure from scratch.
The plan was to make a single game. Just make one Text Adventure, so that I could add “made a game” to the list of random things I’ve done over the years. So I made a game called “Adventure in 20 Rooms”. It had one of every “thing” a text adventure usually has – one interactive person, one locked door that needed a key, one one-way exit, one event that is triggered in a different room to the one you are in, one treasure item, etc… I just wanted to test every text adventure “thing” I could think of. I even made graphics for it, (which were truly awful). I shared different stages of development online throughout the week that it took me to make it. Then, I released it into the world. (I put it on my site, and told the people on Twitter.) That was it! I had written and released “a game”.
By pure coincidence, at the same time I had released my game there was a competition going on to find the “Best game by a newcomer”. Long story short, I ended up winning that competition (I don’t know whether it was because my game was actually good or whether there were so few other people in the running) and the prize for winning was for Teletext artist Horsenburger to make graphics for it. Horsenburger got in touch with me shortly afterwards and suggested that because Adventure in 20 Rooms already had graphics, I should write another game that he could make graphics for, and it is at this point where I broke my “make just one game” rule, and ended up accidentally making about 8 more. It became quite addictive.
Text Adventures I’ve Written. (Click the picture to play)
Adventure in 20 Rooms
This was my first attempt at writing a Text Adventure. It’s playable, completable, but the graphics are awful. It contains one of every mechanism you might find in a Text Adventure – one locked door that needs a key, one interactive person, one one-way exit, one switch that triggers an event in another location, etc… Plus, it won the award for “Best game by a newcomer” so that was quite cool.
PLAYExpo Blackpool
The second game I had to make (read the article at the top of this page for more info) was for the PLAYExpo event. Horsenburger provided the graphics which genuinely are some of the best Teletext art I’ve ever seen. Jim Bagley told me at the event that he had completed it, and TristaBytes & Tamaracade both completed it on live streams and walkthrough videos.
RMC : The Game
I decided to write a game based on Neil’s cave. Neil, for those of you who don’t know, is a YouTuber with a cave full of retro goodness.
The adventure was going to be to help promote Neils upcoming book, but I couldn’t figure out what the plot for writing a book could be, so it ended up just being a generic jaunt though his building completing tasks. I really enjoyed making this one.
The Biggish Tree
The Biggish Tree was written in January of 2022. I decided to set myself a challenge of writing one text adventure per month for a full year. As I only decided this towards the middle of January I only gave myself 10 days to complete it, so it isn’t my best work.
And yes, it’s a text adventure where you have to climb a tree.
Where Did The Moon Go?
This is the second game in the The Biggish Tree Trilogy and was written in February 2022. As some of you may have guessed, (spoiler warning if you haven’t!) when you got to the top of the Biggish Tree you found out that someone had stolen the moon. So this second game finds out where the moon went to.
Put The Moon Back
Having found the Moon in the previous game, (sorry, spoiler!) you now embark on the challenge of putting it back into the sky. I reused an idea from the PLAYExpo game – Jeff Minter’s Shrink-o-matic gun – and this game got some great reviews.
Made in March 2022, so three games in three months! Totally still on track for 12 games in 12 months!
The Time Travelling Hamster
You play as a child waking up in your bedroom, and finding out that your hamster is actually from the future. You have to find certain items around your house and give them to the hamster so it can rebuild it’s time machine.
Made in April 2022, this was the last Text Adventure I made as part of the 12 games in 12 months challenge. See below for the deets.
In May 2022, walking back to the car after a convention in Liverpool, some bloke tried to snatch my wifes belongings. He grabbed some of her stuff and ran off so I instinctively chased after him, but I tripped up, hit the floor with my face, fractured my jaw and shattered a couple of teeth. It was too painful to eat for about a week, and being in pain for so long I lost all drive to do anything creative for months after this. So, unfortunately, the 5th game I was mid-way through writing got postponed. It was called “The Finger From The Future”, because at the end of The Time Travelling Hamster the hamster accidentally takes the players finger with it. It would have been quite good, I reckon.
Follow Friday Adventure – 2020
In 2020, during panedmic times, I was working from home. I set myself a challenge to write a game during my Friday lunch breaks. I got an hour for lunch, so I used the first 20 minutes of every Friday to eat as quickly and furiously as possible, and the following 40 minutes to write as much of the game as possible. It took around 10 consecutive Fridays to complete. It is named after the Twitter tradition of #FollowFriday in which most users would list their favourite followers with the tag #FollowFriday, to encourage you to follow everyone on the list. #FollowFriday, shortened to #FF in later years, never worked, but based on the suggestions of a few of the people who were tagged into #FFs I made this game: The Follow Friday Adventure
It has no graphics, because it genuinely was made in 40 minute weekly chunks.
