Slashdot Mirror
Adventure Story Game for iPod Released
XO Play writes "XO Play today released an adventure story game for the iPod called 'The Rise Of The Lost,' puts you in the role of Sir Jacob Zaviour. Your mission is to travel through lands and fight the evil Wizard Sazque. As you read through the adventure you will be asked to choose your destiny by selecting from a number of options found at the bottom of the page, similar to the 'choose-your-own-adventure' series. The game costs $9.99 is played via the Notes section of your iPod." It wouldn't take too much to write a generator for such games, as Notes uses small text files with HTML tags for links, as long as you had the data to do it with.
Does this mean future 3rd party iPod games? I'm definately hoping for more!
-Teh Pimp
I absolutely ++love++ my iPod. It's a very well engineered device (the best IMHO), and I think it has huge potential.
Seeing apps like this (however simple) becoming more available for it is a cool thing...
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
You could creatively overcome these limitations...
;-)
- To generate "random" numbers, you could have 10 "links" to each page spaced closely together - (for example every letter of the words "go north" leads to a different outcome). The user would pick one. This is defeatable, of course, but if the result is delayed a bit (you die in the room after the next), it would be hard to track. The links could also be shuffled every time you resync.
- you can encode inventory with lots of copies of each page. For example, file "Room001-0010" means you have object 2, while "Room001-0110" means you've got objects 2 and 4 (couting in binary here). Sure, it's wasteful, but if you've got 40 freakin' gigs, it's possible. Also, different stages of the game could use different objects, and you could have the user trade them in when they reach a certain stage. Once you've killed the dragon, your sword gets stuck in his gut.
Just give it time, and someone will write a script to port Zork
Get the whole tech specs for the notes format here. You can link to music, so this adventure could be quite entertaining.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
I tried making a similar game a while back. Mine was text and ASCII "art" based though (mostly used for maps but there were other graphics). I got pretty far into making the game before losing interest but I always had one problem. After you navigate about 300 pages, there is no way to get back to the iPod's main features without hitting back 300 times! How did these folks solve the problem? Do you have to reboot the iPod every time you get bored with the game? How do you save your game? (I used an ingenuous little trick for entering 4 digit level checkpoint passcodes)
I agree...but more importantly, why would you pay 9.99 for a new text game, when you could go and probably find one of those old text games (hhgttg!) and convert them? And a couple people probably will, and when they do, you can probably just download them for free if you dont feel like doing it yourself! :)
All good points, but it assumes "deterministic" is a bad thing.
One of the pleasures of gaming is figuring out the worldview of the game designers. With more open-ended games, like RPGs, you can profitably read the rules. I have several games I've never played, but studied the rules like they were Holy Writ.
The interesting thing about page-linked games (like the old text-adventure novels) is that you have to play it through several times to 'get' what the designer thinks is good/bad behavior. "Should I fight the first chance I get, or try not to fight?" It's the urge to understand the system that underlies true hacking.
Heck, if Zork gets ported to the iPod, I might buy one. That or they aquire a radio tuner.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
You're not the first person to think that. At MacHack last year, one of the Apple guys on the iPod development team actually implemented that for the notes reader (I can't remember the guy's name, sadly. He was the guy who wrote the notes reader app)
This doesn't surprise me as much as it seems to surprise other people. Look at how the iPod started...as a simple mp3 player. Then you could take notes on it. Then you could keep your addresses in there. Now you can download MapQuest directions, take audio notes on it, store pictures. When Apple sees people doing things for their iPod (such as Windows users finding hacks so they too can use them...Apple said "hm...ok...we'll make them available for Windows too"), they see if it's viable and if so, they go for it. I don't for one second believe the iPod is done with its evolutionary process.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Wow -- you've obviously never read a choose-your-own-adventure book. Those are a blast. We're talking printed paper here: now that is simple and deterministic.
Also, I don't imagine that writing a good choose-your-own-adventure is easy. I don't know if this one is actually good, but for the sake of argument... it's like writing a book, but with the twist of exploring a wider set of plot possibilities.
A friend of mine wrote a wacky online choose-your-own-adventure that was quite popular back when the web was young. If you're a bit freaky the game is a real blast. I happen to know he spent months and months on it. There is no reason to think that 10 dollars for a well-thought-out game of this type would be a rip off.
And the idea that deterministic entertainment is inferior is kinda nuts -- nearly all entertainment (books, movies, music) is deterministic. You might want to give games like this a chance before trashing them.
Cheers.
(Sorry 'bout the double post, but Slashdot made me anonymous for some reason?)