New interactive fiction game available

Published: 17th Aug 2007, 22:31:25 | Permalink | Printable

Ever get that sinking feeling?

You stir from your unscheduled nap in front of your keyboard, raising your heavy head gingerly until the uncomfortable glare from the monitor causes your eyes to fidget and itch. A new RISC OS game sits installed on your iconbar and the smell of burnt pizza leaks under your bedroom door. Your exits are east.





>

A new text-based adventure game illustrated with photographs was released this week. Quicksand features the usual interactive fiction interface, and includes pictures taken from various countryside locations to help the player get into the spirit of the adventure - from hills crowded with trees to idyllic streams washing over dull grey pebbles, and more.

The plotline sees you play the role of Stan Tyler, who, while retrieving his son's kite from a tree, falls into a strange new place.

Author Vince Hudd said the RISC OS game is powered by his home grown adventure writing system Trellis, and the images captured on camera in forests near his home. He first demonstrated the software at the Wakefield show in May this year.

Vince added: "Having been written from scratch in the space of about two months, the first working version of Quicksand was demonstrated at the Wakefield show.

"Since then another few months have passed and lots of effort has been put into finding new and ingenious ways to say, 'I haven't had the time'.

"Now, however, the time has come to make the game available, so the past 20 minutes has been spent feverishly changing images here, modifying text there and generally making sure it all works."

The game is available for free from Vince's website below. A text-only version of Quicksand is available for purists.

Links

Quicksand website - apparently there's actually no quicksand involved.

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Discussion

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"A text-only version of Quicksand is available for purists."

Excellent.

But after length he took to take all the photos, I'll to play it at least one with them.

And in such a short space of time, well done Vince.

MikeCarter on 17/8/07 10:41PM
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Thanks

It's had a couple of updates:

I had a brain-botty-burp when I said 1MB VRAM is enough for the graphics; it actually needs 2MB VRAM to run at 800x600x16M - so I've changed it to default to 800x600x32K. Just download the qsand.zip for this update, and copy the contents over the existing !Quicksand installation with 'Newer' set.

If you *do* have 2MB VRAM, then there's a third small zip file, qsandh.zip - download that and copy its contents over !Quicksand to enable 16M colours.

Another change is to cause the cursor keys to generate the four direction commands, and the command 'where' - which tells the player the location number - is now entered via F2.

And finally some changes to the game script itself - there was a small 'feature' in the script, which didn't affect how the game was played, but just looked odd (if the player found it) and I've added a more obvious command to use when two particular objects have been found.

VinceH on 20/8/07 8:53AM
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