Adventure / Zork

After a very long summer I'm back at NUCA and all set with the new project. Over the summer I was working on some personal ideas so I'm excited for this project as I believe I'll be able to incorporate those ideas into the work.

The task for Project 1 is to re-imagine and redefine the game Zork for a modern day audience. It's a text based adventure/discovery game with absolutely no images and requires players to type in commands.

Here are some details about the game sourced from http://www.infocom-if.org/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Welcome to ZORK! You are about to experience a classic interactive fantasy, set in a magical universe. The ZORK trilogy takes place in the ruins of an ancient empire lying far underground. You, a dauntless treasure-hunter, are venturing into this dangerous land in search of wealth and adventure. Because each part of the ZORK saga is a completely independent story, you can explore them in any order. However, since ZORK I is the least difficult, it is usually the best place to begin.

Many strange tales have been told of the fabulous treasures, exotic creatures and diabolical puzzles in the Great Underground Empire. As an aspiring adventurer you will undoubtedly want to locate the treasures and deposit them in your trophy case. You'd better equip yourself with a source of light (for the caverns are dark) and weapons (for some of the inhabitants are unfriendly - especially the thief, a skilled pickpocket and ruthless opponent.

Commands
In the Zork games, the player is not limited to verb-noun commands, such as "take lamp", "open mailbox", and so forth. Instead, the parser supports more sophisticated sentences such as "put the lamp and sword in the case", "look under the rug", and "drop all except lantern". The game understands many common verbs, including "take", "drop", "examine", "attack", "climb", "open", "close", "count", and many more. The games also support commands to the game directly (rather than taking actions within the fictional setting of the game) such as "save" and "restore", "script" and "unscript" (which begin and end a text transcript of the game text), "restart", and "quit".

In all of the Zork text adventures, the following commands apply:

> n, s, e, w

Short for "go north", "go south", etc.

> nw, ne, sw, se

Short for "go northwest", "go southwest", etc.

> u and d

Short for "go up" and "go down"

> i

Reveals a player's inventory

> verbose

Gives full descriptions after each command (rather than omitting details already given to the player)

> score

Displays the player's current score, number of moves, and ranking

I played through the game a little last night and soon found myself very frustrated.

On my first try, I entered a maze after obtaining an Axe, Elvish sword and a bag of food. I soon lost my bag of food to a thief and then ended up killing myself. I literally wandered the maze for about an hour and felt like the game was just trolling/playing around me.

I tried hitting the wall with my axe only to be asked: "What wall would you like to hit. The Granite Wall or the Surrounding Wall?" I chose to hit the surrounding wall and got this response: "I've known some strange people but fighting a surrounding wall?" so I tried hitting the granite wall only to be told that there was no Granite Wall. (Well why then ask if I want to hit it?!). Eventually I committed suicide and was given another chance to play the game. Lost the items I had though, except for the lantern which was back at the place I found it.

During the new life I came across a Platinum Bar. I tried to pick it up and just got "bar bar..." as my response. I tried to look at it some more to just get "bar bar..." as my response. I got that response for a few other actions I tried. At that point I just quit.

With Zork, you need to be quite specific with your commands and wording. For example, during another attempt I died very early into the game because I just used the command "attack" instead of specifying that I wanted to attack with my sword. Even though the game knew I had a sword and a knife, the script had me fighting with my bare hands. Which is somewhat annoying as usually, the game asks what you want to complete an action with if you have more than one item relating to it.




Playing Zork somewhat reminded me of the games from Neutral where the player is for some unknown reason trapped in a locked room and has to find their way out of it.

Items are laid out in plain sight as well as concealed with hints to their whereaboutes. The player relies a lot on their observational skills and paying attention to the smallest details a lot like in Zork, I believe. They also may end up restarting the game a lot and back tracking. It is as an immersive game as Zork because you truely feel trapped and helpless in the room.

http://neutralxe.net/esc/index.html

Zork also reminded me of the old Encarta Encyclopedia game; Mindmaze in the sense of it is also a trial and error game (if you dont know the answers to the questions). In Zork you have the option to attack something or not, enter a room or not and so forth as you try and go further into the underground empire and each option you pick leads to a different result and even death. In Mindmaze you have some of the same options and items laid out in the room to help you (pntings, treasure chests, people).