Sample Adventure Design
From TextAdventure
Contents |
[edit] Organisation
HiddenAway has already taken a few rooms, which is great. If you would like to write a portion of the house, then please sign up for as many rooms as you feel you may be able to do.
However, there will be more work than just designing the rooms. So I've added a technical tasks list at the end, please sign up for these if you feel you would rather do something more technical than creating rooms and objects
[edit] The Backstory and Plot
The player wakes up in the bathroom the morning after a bad party. His quest is to get home and get to bed. It's not his house, and he cant get out of the bathroom. After managing to get out of the bathroom, he can explore the house, which he finds mostly empty, apart from some people asleep and unable to wake in various weird places, like closets, kitchen etc, who are clearly still drunk, and dont respond to any amount of push, prodding or poking. The player finds the front door locked, and may notice that there is a window leading out into an alley in the garage, getting through it takes a bit of work, as he needs something to stand on to get through. He finds the coffee table in the living room has wheels and can be pushed into the garage, where he can stand on it, and get through the window. Going to the front of the house he realises that he's a long way away from home, and he really needs some otehr form of transport. Luckily there is a taxi phone number in the kitchen, and a mobile phone in a coat pocket in the front hall. Using the phone to call a taxi, he can now get in the taxi. The taxi driver requires five pounds to get going, so he must search around the house for some pound coins, which he may find in some strange places. Once he has at least 5 pounds, he can get in the taxi and the game is over.
[edit] Design
[edit] Room List
I've described the first two rooms, as that shows the sort of things I think the designers should come up with.
Each room should have a rough description. this is not the prose that will actually be printed, but some hints for whoever will write that actual prose (the storytellers maybe). It should also have a list of any objects of interest, and anything defining about the room.
We haven't fully fleshed out these rooms as the coders just want something to play with, but for ChapterOne there should be a fairly well fleshed out set of objects, rooms and so forth that the programmers can use.
- Bathroom --HiddenAway 19:31, 30 July 2007 (BST)
- Description Hints - Smelly, white tiled with floral pattern?
- Objects of interest - Sink, Door to Upstairs Hallway, Bathroom door key
- Upstairs Hallway --HiddenAway 19:31, 30 July 2007 (BST)
- Description Hints - Dark and gloomy, with no external windows, mouldy walls
- Objects of interest - small cupboard door (to airing cupboard)
- Master Bedroom --HiddenAway 19:31, 30 July 2007 (BST)
- Wardrobe --HiddenAway 19:31, 30 July 2007 (BST)
- Note that I think it's better if the Wardrobe was an openable object in the room. I will make it a room for now but let me know what you think --HiddenAway 20:18, 16 August 2007 (BST)
- Second Bedroom --KerryT 12:00, 20 August 2007 (BST)
- Spare Room --KerryT 12:00, 20 August 2007 (BST)
- Airing Cupboard
- The Stairs
- Downstairs hall
- Drawing Room
- Living Room --MichaelBruntonSpall 13:47, 31 July 2007 (BST)
- Kitchen --MichaelBruntonSpall 13:47, 31 July 2007 (BST)
- Back garden
- Garage
- Alley beside garage
- Front of House
- In the Taxi
[edit] Item List
- Bathroom key - In Bathroom
- 10 one pound coins - Some example places
- In wardrobe, in a coat pocket
- In second bedroom, in bedside table drawer
- In Spare room, when the curtains are examined
- In drawing room under table (or under paper on the table?)
- In kitchen, in a tin in the cupboard
- In Living room, down the back of the sofa
- In back garden, in the mud if you dig
- In front of house, in the gutter
- In Side Alley, in a bin
- In Bathroom (maybe make it fall from the door?)
- (Please think up some more)
- Mobile phone - In coat pocket, in downstairs hall
- Coffee table on wheels - In Living room, pushable to garage (maybe with a blockage in garden)
- Soft Fluffy Towels - In Airing cabinet
- Cold cheese on toast - In kitchen, under grill
- Spade - In garage, needed to dig in garden
- Unconscious students - In multiple rooms, can be prodded, poked, slapped etc, just groans and rolls over
[edit] Problems
- Get out of the bathroom
- Needs a key, key is on the sink, under the soap
- Find money for taxi
- You need some abritary small amount, say 5 pounds, but there should be more available. your endgame score should depend on how many pound coins you find.
- Get out of house
- To get out of the house, you must get through a window in the garage. To get out of the window you need to get high enough.
- You can get high enough by pushing the coffee table on wheels in the living room into the garage, standing on it, and climbing through the window.
- Getting home
- To get home once you've got out of the house, you must phone a taxi.
- There should be a taxi number on a card in the kitchen
- There should be a mobile phone in a coat in the downstairs hall
- There should be a landline phone in the master bedroom
- Getting coffee table on wheels into garage
- There should be some reason it wont go from the kitchen to the garden.
- Maybe, the step prevents you getting out, or you cant push it over the grass
- You have to find some planks of wood to put it on.
- You can't push it up the planks of wood as your weak, not having had any breakfast. Eating the cold cheese on toast gives you energy (and possibly food poisoning!)
[edit] Technical Tasks
These are some tasks that might need doing that may not directly relate to building the game.
- Manage the trunk bzr branch and launchpad account, accepting users, and doing merges as necessary
- Write the new Dial verb for the phone
- If we're doing this, can we PLEASE make one for use as well? :D --HiddenAway 15:35, 31 July 2007 (BST)
[edit] Discussion
Let me know what you think, there should be enough there that we can all work on it for a few weeks, getting a grip with the tools, compiling and working in a group. My opinion of the tasks is:
- Split up the tasks above into discrete units that can be programmed by different people.
- Get some form of shared source repository, and make sure everyone can get access to it to share the source code.
- Start hacking :)
Please discuss, change, modify all of the above as you see fit --MichaelBruntonSpall 17:17, 27 July 2007 (BST)
Items should also be a part of it I think. Items can have various properties. Apart from that, we should decide who gets which room(s), item(s) and so on :-) -- HiddenAway 19:40, 27 July 2007
I agree, The adventure isn't too terribly well thought out (it just came off the top of my head). I've added some items, and some designery stuff to do to the items, please feel free ot mix it up all you like. It would be nice to have some complicated items, I was thinking the phone would be fairly complicated, maybe providing an actual phone number that you have to type DIAL 01234 808080 or something. Let's have a deadline of say 1 week to sign up to code a small bit of the sample adventure. You can volunteer for as little or as much as you want, and I think we should aim to be finished two weeks after that, so by the 18th of August. I'm in Corfu for that week of august, so everyone will have to organise the collection of all the code, the compiling of the adventure. If somebody would like to publish the adventure, then let me know and I can provide some webspace at my domain name. --MichaelBruntonSpall 09:58, 28 July 2007 (BST)
Hello all! Firstly, apologies for my lengthy absence - I've been variously on holiday and ill. I'm now pretty much back to fighting form, and would like to get a bit of practice in before the coding starts in earnest. I note that the deadline of 18th August has already passed, but, given the slow progress and the fact that Michael's away this week, I hope it's alright if I take on a couple of practice tasks with a view to completing them by the weekend. --KerryT 11:58, 20 August 2007 (BST)
Not a problem Kerry. You've been quiet for a while and now I'm back, is there anything I can help with? How are you getting along with Inform6, Bzr and everything? --MichaelBruntonSpall 17:44, 30 August 2007 (BST)
Thanks for the offer! Sorry I've been so quiet - I'm afraid August turned out to be a much busier month than I expected. I've finished my practice code and now just need to upload it - might need a hand with Bzr as I haven't had a look yet, but hopefully will get everything up in the next day or two so we can see how it all fits together. --KerryT 11.35, 03 September 2007 (BST)
