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Time-limited puzzles

Written February 27th, 2012 by Alex Warren
Categories: Quest 5
1 Comment »

When I was at Perins School last week, I was asked about puzzles with a time limit. For example, the player opens a cupboard, inside which is a hungry alien. How do you give the player 10 seconds to kill the alien, before the alien kills them instead?

This is pretty straightforward to handle, because in Quest you can run scripts after a certain number of seconds. Here’s a quick how-to:

First, add the cupboard and alien objects. The alien should be inside the cupboard. For the cupboard, go to the Container tab. Choose “Container” from the type list, and untick the “Is open” box so that the cupboard is closed when the game begins.

Now we want to run a script when the player opens the object. We’ll tell the player they’ve surprised the sleeping (and hungry) alien, then give them 10 seconds to get rid of the alien before it kills them. To do this, scroll down to “After opening the object”, and add a “Print a message” script. Next, add another script – from the Timers section, choose “Run a script after a number of seconds”.

You can now specify how many seconds to wait before something else happens. In this case, 10 seconds. After 10 seconds, we want to see if the “alien” object is still visible. If so, print a message and kill the player. If not, we don’t need to do anything.

So, all we need to do is add an “If” inside the “After 10 seconds” script, as shown below:

Finally, we just need to implement a way to solve the puzzle. Let’s add a flame thrower object. When the player uses the flame thrower on the alien, the alien bursts into flames.

Add an object called “flame thrower”, then on the “Use/Give” tab scroll down to “Use this on (other object)”. Select “Handle objects individually”, add “alien”, and then edit the script. Add a “print a message” command to say something to the player, then add a “Remove object” command to remove the alien from play.

The resulting script looks like this:

Now after the player opens the cupboard, if they use the flame thrower on the alien, the alien will no longer be visible in the room. This means that after the 10 seconds have elapsed, nothing will happen. However, if the player has not used the flame thrower, the alien will still be visible, in which case the alien enjoys a tasty meal.

Text adventures in the classroom – Quest day at Perins School

Written February 24th, 2012 by Alex Warren
Categories: Education
3 comments

I had the pleasure of spending Wednesday at Perins School in Alresford, Hampshire, where the entire Year 7 (11-12 year olds) went off-timetable for the day to start creating their own text adventures with Quest.

Timetable for the day

This was part of their “Transform” programme spread over five Wednesdays. In the first week, the school had a visit from a local author to talk about writing and creating characters. In week two, they started looking at text adventures, playing The Things That Go Bump In The Night. In week three, they started planning their own games on paper (limiting themselves to four rooms to give a realistic chance of being able to implement the entire game).

Student plans for their own game

I joined them for week four, where the pupils got to create a Quest game for the first time.

To get everybody up to speed, instead of diving in to create their own pre-planned games, the students were given the same game to implement. This was split up into various “Builds” consisting of step-by-step helpsheets, with only about 30 minutes for each Build:

Build 1: Creating a new game, setting font and colour options, adding rooms, exits and objects
Build 2: Adding descriptions to rooms and objects
Build 3: Taking and dropping, containers, lockable objects, adding verbs, winning/losing the game

Students learn about creating exits

After the break, various workshops run by myself and Kristian Still. We covered destroying objects, switching objects on and off, locking and verbs, and any other questions the students had such as keeping a score.

I must admit, I thought the timetable was pretty ambitious – these students hadn’t seen the Quest Editor at all before the day, yet by the end of it, most of them were getting on really well. They had covered everything they needed to implement their own games next week.

Kristian grabbed a few of the students for some quick “phonecast” interviews, and asked them how they found the day:

Overview of the day
Planning their own games ”I found it was so simple, I just couldn’t really resist – I’m doing one at home now. It’s a very fun system.”
Is it difficult? ”It’s great fun. It was exciting trying to think up ideas”. According to this student, coming up with the ideas is the hard bit, and implementing them is just pressing some buttons! I guess that means they found the software pretty easy to use.
Switching objects on and off

Testing the game

It was really great to see the students getting on well with the software, and I look forward to seeing their finished games.

Introducing Quest WebEditor – create text adventures online in your browser

Written February 16th, 2012 by Alex Warren
Categories: Quest 5, textadventures.co.uk
8 comments

I was hoping to announce the world’s very first online text adventure maker – but, dammit! Playfic got there first, by a matter of days. So, what I am announcing today may be the world’s second-ever online text adventure maker, but it is also rather different to Playfic as you will see.

The Quest WebEditor is the world’s first online visual text adventure maker. It is (almost) the entire desktop version of Quest, but transplanted into a web browser. So, now you can create a text adventure game, with no prior programming experience, and without downloading any software. You have access to the full range of Quest functionality, including multiple languages, the ability to use hyperlinks in your game (to make it easier to play without typing), and the ability to embed videos, pictures and sounds for a modern text game experience (personally I’m fairly tired of text adventures being thought of as “retro” all the time – there’s no need for them all to look like MS-DOS).

Let me take you on a tour!

First, you’ll need to log in to textadventures.co.uk. You’ll then be able to access the “Create” page, which looks like this:

Enter a name for your game (you can always change it later), and choose a language.

Hit the Create button, and your game will be created. This is what it looks like in the editor:

This is a similar layout to the desktop software, and the full range of functionality is available – including cut/copy/paste and undo/redo.

The Settings button lets you turn on Simple Mode – as in the desktop software, this hides away some of the functionality to make it easier to get started.

I’ve renamed the initial “room” to “lounge”, and I’ve clicked the “+ Room” button to add another location to the game, a kitchen. Now, with the lounge selected, I can add an exit to the kitchen from the Exits tab:

I can add an object by clicking the “+ Object” button. Here I’ve added a sofa, and entered a text description:

I can try the game by clicking the Play button. It appears in a new tab, using the same “play online” interface as the published games on the site.

I can interact with the game just like all Quest games. There’s no need to force your players to type commands – the hyperlinks allow you to make a game which can be played with a click of the mouse, or a touch of the screen:

Here’s the game output after looking at the sofa, and moving east into the kitchen.

The real power of Quest comes from scripts, which let you control anything in the game – move the player, change responses according to what the player has done before, set up puzzles, show pictures and more. Back in the editor, let’s change the description of the sofa so that it runs a script instead of just displaying text:

Now we can click the “Add new script” button to choose from various options. This is the Simple Mode list – there is a much bigger list if we turn this off:

Let’s play a YouTube video when the player looks at sofa. I choose “Play YouTube video” from the “Add New Script” dialog, and then I can enter a video ID. I found a clip of a TV sofa advert:

And here’s what the game looks like if we run it now:

So there you have it!

This is currently in private beta – email me if you’re very keen to test it. Otherwise, I will make it available as a public beta in a few weeks.

Game Based Learning – Interactive Fiction at LWF Free Festival

Written January 23rd, 2012 by Alex Warren
Categories: Education
1 Comment »

Learning Without Frontiers (LWF) is at London Olympia on Wednesday 26th and Thursday 27th January, and alongside the (expensive) main conference there is a free festival, featuring a variety of sessions on digital learning.

On Thursday from 10.30 – 12.00, iO are hosting a session on Game Based Learning at Salon Bourdieu (S2):

This session will cover three different areas of the use of games in learning and most importantly games creation in creating learning opportunities for students. The session will draw on practical experiences that have already taken place in schools, refer and develop thinking based on newly released research outcomes, and give delegates solid starting points for them to take away and develop in their schools or organisations.

As part of this, myself, Kristian Still and Tom Cole will be talking about Interactive Fiction and Quest.

This session will explore how classroom practitioners have enabled their students to start writing, creating and engaging with Interactive Fiction games. The speakers will examine how disengaged readers are now reading and even better engaged in writing games. Examples of how IF is being used in other subject areas such as Science are being explored and developed.

More details are in the full schedule (annoyingly there seems to be no way to link to a particular session, so scroll down to Game Based Learning at 10.30 on Thursday. Also for some reason the programme has me down as “Alex Ward”).

Hope to see you there!

Gamebook mode (“Choose Your Own Adventure”) in Quest 5.2

Written January 16th, 2012 by Alex Warren
Categories: Quest 5
5 comments

I’ve started work on Quest 5.2, aiming for a release in the Spring. One of the first new features I’ve implemented begins to take Quest away from “pure” text adventures to open up another type of interactive storytelling – gamebooks, also known as Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA).

The gamebook mode is fundamentally a simple alternative Core library, built on the Quest platform. This means that you can create games using Quest’s visual editor, include graphics, upload your game to be played online in a web browser, and have your game converted into an app – everything that a “full” Quest game supports, with the difference that it is much simpler to create and play a gamebook, as players are only given a limited set of choices.

To create a gamebook, the “New Game” dialog has been updated with a new “Game type” option:

The Editor for Gamebooks is simple – each game comprises a number of pages. Each page has some descriptive text, and links to other pages.

Pages automatically default to names Page1, Page2 etc., but you can call a page any name you like.

This is what a new gamebook (as shown in the Editor above) looks like when you play it:

That’s all there is to it – pretty simple stuff really, at least for this first version. There is definitely potential for adding functionality in the future – because gamebooks are not fundamentally any different from ordinary Quest games, the full power of Quest’s scripting engine is available. This means that different behaviour could be triggered based on the player’s previous choices, random elements could be added, YouTube or Vimeo videos embedded, and a whole lot more.

Hopefully this new mode will open up interactive stories to a wider audience – if a full text adventure is too much work, a gamebook is one way of creating an interactive story where you really can focus much more on the writing than the implementation.

Gamebook mode is part of Quest 5.2, which is currently in development. I’m aiming to release this around Spring, although there will be a beta version before then. If you want to try it out right now, you will need to build the code yourself.

Quest 5.1 now available

Written January 11th, 2012 by Alex Warren
Categories: Quest 5
4 comments

Quest 5.1 is now available.

The new version of Quest features the following improvements below (mostly copied from the beta announcement, so apologies if this is all familiar!)

Enhanced Game Browser. You can now see star ratings, and read reviews and comments, directly within Quest. You also have more control – from the Options window, you can change the download folder, and enable or disable the Sandpit and Adult categories. Also, the Adult category option can be “locked out” with a registry setting (see “Configuring Quest” on the wiki for details) – handy if you’re rolling out Quest on a school network for example.

Simple Mode. Hides Quest’s more advanced functionality in the Editor – great for beginners, or for using Quest with younger children. The Editor becomes stripped right down to the basics – only rooms and objects are displayed in the tree, without the distracting “clutter” of functions, walkthroughs and so on. The Script Editor is cut down so only the most important script commands are displayed when adding a command. But full power is only ever a click away – you can toggle Simple Mode on or off at any time from the Tools menu.
Walkthrough Enhancements. You can now include walkthroughs in published .quest files, and the new walkthrough assertions feature allows you to create automated tests. See Walkthrough Assertions on the wiki for details.
Loops. There is a new “while” loop, and a new step parameter for “for”.
Use/Give. These have been moved to their own tab in the object editor, which is now more flexible. There are now separate lists for “Use (other object) on this” and “Use this on (other object)”, so you can set up a “use A on B” relationship from either A or B.
Hyperlinks. You can now customise the look of hyperlink menus – change the menu fonts and colours, and turn link underlining on or off. It’s now easier to create custom hyperlinks – the new ObjectLink function makes it easier to create an object hyperlink, and the new CommandLink function lets you create a hyperlink that will run any command.
Metadata. From the game editor, you can now enter a description and choose a category. There is a new game ID which will be used to uniquely identify a game. This will make it possible to upload a game to textadventures.co.uk without having to re-enter descriptions etc. on the web upload form.
Better error reporting. Error messages are now more detailed, so if your game won’t load you should have a better idea why. If Quest crashes, you can now submit an error report online.
Comments in the Editor. Script comments (lines beginning with “//”) are no longer stripped away when you open an ASLX file in the Editor – comments are now viewable in the Script Editor, and you can add and edit them.
Videos now automatically start.
You can now turn off sounds from the Options window.

Full upgrade notes are available on the wiki.

Download Quest 5.1

“Play online” now works on mobile browsers

Written January 6th, 2012 by Alex Warren
Categories: textadventures.co.uk
Comments Off

All games on textadventures.co.uk can now be played online via iPhone, iPad and Android browsers, and on desktop browsers the player has a fresh new look.

Although the main website isn’t particularly mobile-optimised (just yet!), if you click the “Play online” link for a game and are using a mobile browser, you’ll see the new mobile-friendly version of the player.

The inventory, compass etc. are moved off onto separate screens, which you can access by tapping the “+” button next to the input box.

This means the experience of playing a game via a mobile web browser is similar to what you get with a stand-alone Quest game app. So that’s (currently) 356 games which are now playable through a mobile web browser – plenty of choice for gaming on the move, as long as you have an internet connection.

If you log in first, you can save your progress as you go along by tapping the “Save” button on the “More” tab. The game is then saved under your account, which means if you later log in from a desktop machine, you can resume your game from there.

Mobile browser games support pictures, which are resized to fit the size of the screen. You can also use hyperlinks for those games which have them (although most of the games currently on the site were written for older versions of Quest which didn’t support hyperlinks). You can use the Inventory and Location panes to give you quick access to objects without typing. Also, games written for Quest 4.x and later support abbreviations, so you can type “x mon” instead of “look at security monitors” for example.

The mobile player will automatically adjust to the resolution of your device, so it works nicely on tablets too.

The desktop browser player now also has a fresher look:

I hope you enjoy the experience of playing text adventures on your smartphone – don’t forget about the stand-alone smartphone apps as well, allowing you to play on your phone even without an internet connection. I hope to release more games as apps in the near future, and if you’re interested in having your game converted into an app, please get in touch.

Quest 5.1 Beta

Written December 14th, 2011 by Alex Warren
Categories: Quest 5
6 comments

Quest 5.1 Beta is now available. This is the beta test version of the next release of Quest, which features the following improvements:

Enhanced Game Browser. You can now see star ratings, and read reviews and comments, directly within Quest. You also have more control – from the Options window, you can change the download folder, and enable or disable the Sandpit and Adult categories. Also, the Adult category option can be “locked out” with a registry setting – handy if you’re rolling out Quest on a school network for example.

Simple Mode. Hides Quest’s more advanced functionality in the Editor – great for beginners, or for using Quest with younger children. The Editor becomes stripped right down to the basics – only rooms and objects are displayed in the tree, without the distracting “clutter” of functions, walkthroughs and so on. The Script Editor is cut down so only the most important script commands are displayed when adding a command. But full power is only ever a click away – you can toggle Simple Mode on or off at any time from the Tools menu.
Walkthrough Enhancements. You can now include walkthroughs in published .quest files, and the new walkthrough assertions feature allows you to create automated tests. Enter “assert:” followed by an expression at any point in a walkthrough, and that expression will be evaluated. The walkthrough will terminate if the expression evaluates to false.
Loops. There is a new “while” loop, and a new step parameter for “for”.
Use/Give. These have been moved to their own tab in the object editor, which is now more flexible. There are now separate lists for “Use (other object) on this” and “Use this on (other object)”, so you can set up a “use A on B” relationship from either A or B.
Hyperlinks. You can now customise the look of hyperlink menus – change the menu fonts and colours, and turn link underlining on or off. It’s now easier to create custom hyperlinks – the new ObjectLink function makes it easier to create an object hyperlink, and the new CommandLink function lets you create a hyperlink that will run any command.
Metadata. From the game editor, you can now enter a description and choose a category. There is a new game ID which will be used to uniquely identify a game. This will make it possible to upload a game to textadventures.co.uk without having to re-enter descriptions etc. on the web upload form.
Better error reporting. Error messages are now more detailed, so if your game won’t load you should have a better idea why. If Quest crashes, you can now submit an error report online.
You can now turn off sounds from the Options window.

Download Quest 5.1 Beta

“The Things That Go Bump In The Night” now available for iOS and Android

Written December 5th, 2011 by Alex Warren
Categories: Quest 5, textadventures.co.uk
2 comments

The Things That Go Bump In The Night is now available for iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) and Android devices.

In this game, written by Tim Hamilton, you are a security guard settling down to a quiet night shift, when things start to go wrong. You must make your way around the compound, solving puzzles and dispatching mysterious beasts.

This is the first Quest game to appear for smartphones, and I believe it is the first text adventure to be specifically designed for a pocket-sized touch screen – you can play the entire game without typing, instead using the hyperlinks and tabs to navigate and interact with the game world.

You can find out more about how the game was made in my earlier blog post. The game is fairly difficult – if you get stuck, check out the comments on the original textadventures.co.uk game page for some tips! Also check out the Twitter hashtag #ttgbitn.

More games will be released soon. Maybe you’d like to write one? Any game written for Quest 5 can now be converted into an app, so if you’re interested, please get in touch!

“Play Online” now supports saving

Written December 2nd, 2011 by Alex Warren
Categories: textadventures.co.uk
Comments Off

Playing Quest games online is far more popular than downloading for offline play – it doesn’t require any downloads, and it works on all platforms. But the offline player (requiring a download of the Windows-only Quest software) provides a better experience in a number of ways – most notably, until now it has been the only way of saving your progress in a game so you can come back to it later.

Well, I’ve now updated “Play Online” (a.k.a WebPlayer) so that you can save your game, if you’re logged in. When playing, there is a new “Save” button in the top right of the page.

To restore your saved game later, log in and then go back to the game page. You’ll see two “play online” links:

So, now you can play games on any device, save them and come back later – even on a different device. Play at work during your lunch hour, then finish the game when you get home.

Please let me know if you have any questions or feedback about the new feature.

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