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This month, create your own retro game in under an hour!

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Here is issue #4 of ">REMEMBER"! Today's article is a tutorial, for the first time, but not the last!
My news I was busy this month with the release of Light, a sci-fi visual novel for mobile, which I talked about a bit all the way back in Issue #2. I'm also writing another project for the same company; it's very nice to be able to make some money writing narrative games! The translation of Tristam Island is still underway, and the text of the game is almost done; this had the beneficial side-effect of having me read the game's text line by line, which led me to find a couple of typos and mistakes. Release 3, along with the French translation, will probably come out in late April or early May (I still need to translate the parser, which is no small feat, and some accent-related stuff of course). In the meantime, full reviews of Tristam Island are appearing in all sorts of magazines, and I couldn't be happier! The game has appeared, or is slated to appear, in "Zzap! 64", "Crash Magazine", "Juiced.GS", "Al's Spectrum Annual", "Amiga Future", and more! Overall, the reviews have been very positive, which I'm obviously quite proud of. Can't wait for the physical release, some time this year!
Last month's issue The response to the article in Issue #3, on women's contributions to the text adventure genre, was bigger than ever! I heard from a lot of people, both replying to this newsletter and talking to me on Twitter. I'm quite pleased with it! If you're interested, here's some further reading on this: Gareth Pitchford listed a great number of women who contributed to the British 80s scene, and an account related to the Spanish-speaking IF scene had a whole Twitter thread highlighting women's contributions to that scene. Thank you all for the discussion, I learned a lot of things!
Community news Quite a few things have happened this month: In the last couple of editions, I somehow forgot to tell you about Aaron A. Reed's newsletter, "50 years of text games", which is a very interesting read! Every week corresponds to a year, and Aaron picks a text-based game (including interactive fiction but also gamebooks, ARGs, and The Oregon Trail) published that year and writes an in-depth article about it. There is ton of research behind it, and even seasoned adventurers will discover something new on Adventure (1976) or Scott Adams games (1978). Highly recommended reading! Hot on the heels of their Christmas jam, Adventuron is organizing a new game jam, under the umbrella of the "Text Adventure Literacy Project". You have about 20 days to make a text adventure with a "VERB NOUN" parser that would be suitable for young ones; the idea is to help younger players learn how to play a text adventure and discover this great genre. There are several prizes, and Scott Adams himself is involved! Huge kudos to the folks at Adventuron for organizing this jam. Torbjörn Andersson has been taking a look at "Mini-Zork II", an unreleased Infocom game which aimed to give a taste of "Zork II" on a C64 cassette. The game was recovered when the so-called Infocom files were uploaded on Github, and Torbjörn fixed a few bugs. Work is underway on his Github. Remember ">REMEMBER" (ha) Issue #2, on text compression with Infocom's tools? Work on the problem of determining good abbreviations is still underway (it's really not easy to find the best algorithm!), and I really need to update my tool to enjoy these algorithmic advances. But this work had a very cool payoff this month! Thanks to Matthew Russotto's algorithm and Henrik Asman's help for code cleanup, Torbjörn was able to compress the size of "Mini-Zork II" enough that it can indeed be played on a C64 cassette on Fredrik Ramsberg and Johan Berntsson's Ozmoo interpreter! My understanding is that Torbjörn wants the eventual final version to fit on a C64 cassette, just like Infocom's game would have. Congratulations to all! Andrew Plotkin had a very interesting article on the topic of unwinnability in adventure games, challenging some conventional wisdom about Infocom games, and reflecting on the evolution of the design of adventure games through the ages.
Article of the month In today's article, I'm showing you a really easy and visual way to make a text-based adventure (like a computerized "Choose your Own Adventure"-style book) for your favorite retro platform. Mind you, not a text adventure with a parser, like the ones we've been talking about; so this might be considered slightly out of scope for this newsletter, but I'm assume it'll still be interesting to you. After all, I'd wager you've all tried to make this kind of game when you were first discovering BASIC 🙂 The tutorial can be done under an hour, and is accessible enough that children could try their hand at it! It involves a really cool and visual new tool that you probably haven't heard about before, and Infocom's Z-Machine. The result is compact, fast, and portable; what more could you want? Dive in!
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