A Text Adventure In Space
Admiral Copeland entrusted you with a mission to bring a pirate to trial. En-route the pirate's band attacks, boards your ship and kills your crew, throwing you into the brig. But you're not going to let that stop you from completing your mission are you?
Piracy is an Interactive Fiction Text Adventure. It was my entry entry in the 14th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition, and as the competition is over, (Piracy 2.0 came in fifth in a field of 35), it is now available for download from the Competition's site. Or mirrored from my site.
To play it, you will need to download a good Z-Intepreter.
The game has a fairly extensive informational menu system. Simply type >about
Please note: There is a >Walkthrough command, which is not well documented, but can help if you get stuck. The Walkthrough is also available here.
When INFOCOM, the undisputed master of Interactive Fiction, released a game package, it usually included items that didn't help directly with playing the game, but helped immerse the player into the universe presented within the game. Often this included maps, blueprints, letters, documents, and other books or paper. It also often included hard items, badge pins, plastic identification cards, a bag of pocket lint, and the wonderful Wishbringer Stone, which, although it appeared to be made of green glow-in-the-dark plastic, actually glowed a brilliant purple.
Piracy has feelies as well, to help immerse you into the game.
Blueprint of a Guardian Class Patrol Ship
This is a blueprint of a Guardian Class Patrol Ship like the UWS Ceres, the ship on which the adventure takes place. You can download this blueprint here in several sizes. Click on the size of the map you'd like to download. This can then be printed out on your printer.
Standard Issue Purple UW DataCube
A DataCube is a crystaline data storage device. It measures 2.5cm per side. Computer data is stored in the actual alignment of the crystaline structure within. These are usually stamped with United Worlds logo. This one is purple, and is probably old, because the official United Worlds stamp is worn.
Limited Edition Purple DataCube will be made available to players of Piracy 2.0. See Details.
Mapping a game's environment is a very useful thing to do when playing Interactive Fiction. Since there is no visual representation of the layout of the game's setting, players usually draw easy-to-understand maps which help them get around. This game takes place on a ship which is very familiar to the protagonist, so it makes little sense to force a player to draw his/her own map. So I have provided a map for your use.
Piracy 2.0 is my first attempt at Interactive Fiction since the 1980s, long before adequate tools to write them existed for the public. BASIC was a language I was very familiar with, so I wrote Piracy 1.0 in BASIC, with a simple two-word parser that would have been very very frustrating for someone to play today.
Inform 6.0 allowed me to write it with a tool that was more than adequate, and allowed me to do things I would have loved to do in BASIC but just could not, easily.
The 14th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition is a yearly event where IF writers enter projects for public judging. Each year many entries are submitted, and judging, which usually takes 6 weeks, is handed down at the end.
Read more about Piracy 2.0 in the IF Comp 2008.
Unbenownst to me, Piracy 2.0 has been placed in the running for several XYZZY Award categories! This is hot news! I certainly didn't expect this!
I'm up for Best Game, Best Setting, and Best Puzzles. This is a major bonus for me, and a complete surprise!
Winners will be announced March 14. Since, in each category, I'm up against games that beat me in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition, I'm not expecting to win anything, but, and I say this with no irony or resentment - it is an honor just to be nominated.
- I re-learned the truth of the old adage: The first 90% takes 90% of the time. The next 10% takes the other 90% of the time.
- Get good testers
- Don't go on vacation when you're 95% done
- Don't make tiny changes late in the game assuming everything that came before will just work now
- Change the "examine me" description (Oh, and you're as good looking as ever, of course.)
- Don't release a completed game map to the public. In this case, the map was fine, but the objects in the room should not be listed.
- Trust the reviewers. They're playing the game you concocted. You're too close to it. They're not. It's they who are your audience.
- Even a simple feelie is cool! (But a more elaborate one rocks!) But this one rules: http://store.asymmetric.net/images/feelies.lg.jpg
- Disambiguation problems are hard to get around sometimes... Take ">shoot pirate, >x pirate, >x corpse" problem.
- Covering contingencies you didn't think of is hard. ">put battery in panel" - nothing... ">jump" in the vent, etc.
- In my case, more printed background material would be nice. Perhaps a dossier on Whitehall, or a copy of your orders.
- ">read paper" should work.
Piracy ©1985,2008 Sean Huxter
