Hi guys,

I am planning another text adventure. At the moment I am working out the plot for the game, but my overall aim is for this one to be significantly more advanced than my current project "The Search For The Lost Football" and of a much larger scale.

I am also adding what will hopefully be an interesting twist to the text adventure genre.

I'll keep you posted.

Kind regards,

Francis.

Just a quick reply so you know that someone's noticed, Francis.

Sounds good - the interesting twist sounds curious (sometimes I love new additions, sometimes I hate them - time-based ones, anyone? gah!). Whilst I'm mega-excited about Jon's Z-Machine Interpreter, for those of you writing adventures from scratch, you can really go beyond the limitations of a VM approach and make the most of the beeb's capabilities. The Z-Machine Interpreter is unlikely to do anything with graphics and sound, for example.

Hope this doesn't slow down development on The Search for the Lost Football, tho. I'm itching to play-test something ...

Sam.

Yes, it's always nice to get a bit of feedback!

Development on The Search For The Lost Football is still ongoing, although I haven't really done much programming-wise with it. Some of my time is being spent on improving my 6502 assembly skills so that I can replace some of the BASIC code with faster assembly equivalents.

I'm also currently working on some text compression routines based on variable bit encoding. I've been quite pleased with my results so far, but there is still room for improvement.

With regards to my new text adventure it is going to be a Mode 0 affair. My reason for using Mode 0 is because this adventure will be a bit more verbose than The Search For The Lost Football so a Mode 7 screen would fill up pretty quick. I am also swithering on including informational graphics (e.g. being able to look at maps) although I don't have any plans for including sound effects.

I do have the basics of the plot for the new adventure done, but I don't want to give too much away at the moment.

Kind regards,

Francis.

Hi guys,

This is just a quick update on my second text adventure (without giving too much away ).

The game is currently entitled The Fortress, although this will likely change as work on the game progresses. It is a sci-fi adventure intended for the more mature audiences due to some of the content that will be in it (hopefully no one will have a problem with that).

One of the more interesting items of inventory will be a blow-up doll that will be required for completion of some of the puzzles and can also be used for other activities (I'll leave that up to your imagination! ).

I have attached a screen shot of the current game as it stands at present:

You can see that I have used a custom font and I also have the facility for using bold fonts as well.

Kind regards,

Francis.

Hey, Francis.

That's looking very Z-Machine-y ... I love it ...

Quite like the working title too!

Sam.

Yeah has a nice look to it. Good work that man

Thanks for your comments!

Kind regards,

Francis.