Instructions

Most text-based games use a standard set of typed commands for interacting with the game world. Click inside of the game window and start typing. Here are a few commands to get you started:

• l  –  look around
• i  –  see what's in your inventory
• n  –  move north
• w  –  move west
• x [object]  –  examine an object
• take [object]  –  take something you see
• drop [object]  –  drop an object that's in your inventory
• push [object]
• taste [object]
• hit [object]

Info

A while back I started work on a new widget for Mac OS X's Dashboard, one that would allow the loading, playing, and saving of games released in the z-code format (e.g. Infocom games). The widget is based on zplet, an open-source z-code interpreter. I managed to create an interface for loading games, but I never was able to modify zplet to allow saving. The project has been shelved until I can find a creative solution to this.

Avilable for play on this page is the very simple demo game built specifically for this widget. The player exists as a component inside of the operating system, one that has accidentally stumbled into the Dashboard. Users of OS X will immediately get the references, but anyone who hasn't played around with Dashboard will likely be completely lost.

Resources

The z-code source file for this game is available for deconstruction. It's very simple; the complicated bits, such as the text parser and grammar library, are rolled into the program at compile time. If your text editor of choice is either TextWrangler or BBEdit you may install my Inform language code coloration module to make the file a bit more readable.