itch.io

hey ifcats - I'll look up where I last had the source and post it here. Good idea.

Good point, I see no harm in sharing the source, especially for an educational development environment. You keep your image,/text copyrights and such anyway unless you specifically cc0 them. And Chris mentions on the site t&C's that Adventuron in its current form is not for commercial development anyway, so there's no worry legally about someone selling your hard work.

I'll try and put my source code up as soon as possible.

Do you have a link to your VOD / past broadcast for your stream?

Thank you so much, never thought I would place so high amongst all this quality we had!

I will DM you over twitter! Thanks again!

That's a really good idea - I think thumbnail is a huge part. It's honestly, really honestly, why I put the pixel image of the main character on it, instead of just the title. Anime-style girls catch the eye for a lot of folk, even with a very low pixel count!

But this is why I do jams - to learn!

Oh yeah, Happy New Year all!

For a very niche gamejam, and as a Dev with no real social media presence (I have like sub 20 twitter followers lolz), I'm surprised at those stats. Tbh I didn't expect more than 20 views/plays!  ( I also did some reddit, but didn't get any click throughs - my reddit-fu is bad).

Most of my hits come from itch.io directly - through the front page/popular & new and for people looking at some of the tags I have (including Xmas, cyberpunk, interactive fiction). Some come from people playing my other more popular game (Mazeborn). And a few from ifdb.com.

I think the Xmas theme and the cyberpunk theme timing have contributed to the overperfomance, although I don't really know if it's an overperfomance unless other jam submitters share their stats (and how much social media they've pushed this on!).

I think overall though, given some of the questions I've had, more people are discovering Adventuron (and text adventures) through this, and that can't be a bad thing.

Finished this, I liked the mystery surrounding it all. A few observations though - I often knew what to do, but the game wouldnt let me do itm so I had to keep going to the HINT system (thanks for that btw) to find what the actual words I had to use were.

And exmaple might be that I knew to use the ladder in a certain place, but leaning it, climbing it, putting it etc. didn't work. Had to rely on the hint system to tell me to drop it, which didn't feel quite right. 

Same with another scene involving the knife, and having to be very specific about what to cut with it, even though any of the synonyms for the thing I was supposed to cut should've worked.

Still, despite all that, good xmas mystery, nicely done with a great atmosphere.

Excellennt - love the immediate approach to everything. It's not too wordy - every word on the screen is effective at communicating the right tone and inspires curiousity in the right places.

I finished the game with the HULK SMASH approach, and I'm so glad you left that in there instead of having some obtuse reason for not doing it. I like the multiple endings and multiple approaches (my game has the same!).

Graphics are great too, perfect at communicating everything you need to in the resolution you chose to do the graphics in.

Great stuff - first game I finished here.

Damn dude, those graphics and font choice are awesome, Loving the colours and details.

ah great spot...I wonder did I forget to loop the else... Thank you!

Thanks for playing the game! So post what Rank you got at the end! It ranges from C to A/S. 

The game can take from 10mins to 30mins for the first run. Subsequent runs can be done in less time!

AH! I left some test/debug code in that recreates the key after you use it....DUHHHHH

Ooh, I wonder how the first bullet point came to be - must be a rogue gap in the logic.

Second bullet point - nice thought process there, but it always takes a leap :-)

You can leave a comment here I think, even regarding spoilery things - It should be ok. Thanks Errol!

And I think I'm going to give up sending this game to people who have never played adventure games and don't want to understand!

Thanks Errol! Very appreciated. You can get an S rank, but not an A+.

Getting an S rank, to be fair, is very subjective (rather than objective) to my whims! So it involves doing and not doing certain things!

Also, I've been getting feedback from non-text-adventure players and younger kids, telling me theyre finding it too hard (Hmmmm...) so i've had to 'consolise' it by adding a reminder prompt every 5 turns!

Hey Errol, thanks for the kind offer. I would simply appreciate the bugs you might come across!

It's a little different from the more traditional entries thus far, but I hope you'll enjoy playing it. It's a short story, so play time will probably range from 10 minutes to half an hour, depending upon the routes you take and how much of a completionist you are in order to figure out how to get the "S RANK".

Best of luck to my fellow Adventurons hurtling towards the submission finish line! May all your typos be un-typoed! May all your pixels be ...er... placed-els.

Thanks for setting this up @Adventuron, it's been a nice way to learn something new.

How do I use the teleporter? USE TELEPORTER doesnt work...

EDIT:

Ah, I missed the tutorial message that said "activate". I think adding a "Use" synonym here would be good too.

Fair enough, those are good points that you can't argue with!

Maybe, in the future, the fact that a game has just been (auto) loaded could be exposed to the developer, so we could potentially offer a recap or summary of the adventure thus far or something! Not sure if text adventure games do this, but I think it would be a neat, user friendly feature.

And just thinking about that, there's nothing stopping me adding a 'recap' command right now that could summarise what the player has done so far...hmmm...

Is it possible to disable autosave (on the compiled version) - it's a little jarring, coming back to my game, and not having the full experience again from the beginning. I'm hoping I can disable autosave!

So time is running away from me, after joining a bit late. I've had to make choices between working on the game or devlogging, and there's not devlog without a game. I have been keeping at it, and I've had to reduce the scope of the game so I can hopefully make it satisfactorily enough for the deadline.

I've noticed that I could manage things better, if I setup all my key locations, and could move through them - without the flavour text and obstacles. After that, it's a case of adding those things in, it an iterative manner - so at least I can deliver something with a beginning and an end!

I'm having lots of fun with :overlay and :set_graphics.

And I've still stuck to the 160*40px resolution and PICO-8 limited palette. I think I've shown a little improvement as I've been doing stuff. 

Anyway, here's a peek at some 'cutscene' style art:

Here's hoping to make it for the deadline. Thanks for your encouragement and kind words.

I've never dev blogged any of my games or jams in progress. I've been nervous about doing that for various reasons, but I'll give it a go with this project.

This is my first time coding for Adventuron - I came across a tweet about this gamejam from @lexoloffle (zep - the Pico-8 creator) a few weeks ago, and remembered about this gamejam a few days ago. I had previously seen adventuron.io in passing earlier in the year, and had always meant to come back to it.

 I decided to join and start 2 days ago. It's been a while since I've done a gamejam, so this seemed perfect - especially as the last time I tried to write a text adventure was when I was 10, on an RM Nimbus machine at school. 

I've decided with doing a dystopian, cyberpunk themed xmas game - what with the release of Cyberpunk 2077, and also cyberpunk (small c) is just cool in general. As it's a jam, and I've entered halfway through the jam, I'm going to focus on a very small scenario - but as dense as I can make it.

 I'm hoping to have at least 2-3 solutions to each challenge in the game - in trying to keep up with the style of play that games like Deus Ex, Prey, Watchdogs Legion et al all follow. I'm approaching this with the mindset that there will be advantages and disadvantages to the different solutions (maybe taking an easy solution earlier on, costs you a resource that makes another challenge later on harder without it).

I also want to take a more simplistic, maybe modern, approach to a text adventure; I don't want the game to be a reading comprehension test. Instead I am going to happily highlight, indicate and point out all the things you can interact with - and even suggest actions to be taken. I want fun not frustration to be the overall takeaway! But as this is my first text adventure, and I have limited time, it's a broad goal.

For graphics, I am using the awesome PyxelEdit, using a Pico-8 palette - as I am quite familiar with it (and want to be even moreso). I'm potentially looking at trying out some chibi/anime/Famicon-esq sprite art style - to fit with the limited resolution, but also thematically with the 80's style approach to cyberpunk, where it's a mishmash of American and Japanese culture.

I'm finding the Cookbook on the adventuron.io site quite useful, although it feels like there isn't quite a 1:1 parity between the cookbook and the reference guide. The sample games are helping too. While I am multi-language coder, predominantly Javascript at this point, I'm having to fight the urge to treat the code like JSON! But I am using camelCase, because anything else is just too foreign for me!

So far I've been having fun experimenting and discovering some of the more funky bits of tech available, that you wouldn't think would be in a text adventure (well, not at least when I played them in the late 80's/early 90's).

Coverage from last time, which we should use for the future! (obviously, without my promotions/plugs)

Guys, you dropped the ball on this Jam - you didn't advertise this in enough places (Reddit, Twitter etc.!) FC_Jams tend to be big, and I was hoping number 4 would be bigger! I even got FC_JAM 3 some actual press coverage in Retro Gamer magazine last time, and a few small youtubers involved.

This time round, it completely flew over everyone's radar!

Sorry, just wanted to rant, because I didn't know this Jam was going on.

You can play this in your browser. Thanks for playing!

Apologies for some of the placeholder art - I just ran out of time to Polish.

Title Teaser. without polish and placeholder graphics. Finished the gameplay loop, it's time for some serious polish!!!!

Here's a very quick Sneak Peek of my game in progress, I started a bit late, so hopefully can catch up....

Dude! Your game got a good mention in retroGamer magazine, congrats!

Hey! Your game got a mention on retroGamer magazine!!

Hey Dude, your game got a mention in retroGamer magazine!

Congrats, your game got a mention in retroGamer magazine!

Your game got a mention :-)

Hi All,

Just to let you know, I got in contact with retroGamer magazine a few months ago about this Jam, and Fantasy Consoles in general, and they decided to do a small feature on it!! Congrats to all those games mentioned!

This is the May issue of retroGamer in the UK.

thanks dude

Hey, What did you use to write this game?

Thats awesome, thanks for your response! I'm always too scared to do "particles" as I worry too much about the CPU cost but your solution is great!

Graphics are very cute. Excellent art style.