Brass Lantern
the adventure game web site

Search

How to Play a Text Adventure, Part 1, Page 2

by Stephen Granade

Playing Through Glowgrass

When you start Glowgrass, it will print some introductory text, the beginning of its story. The part above the name of the game and its credits sets the stage: you're visiting the ruins of a vanished civilization known as the Ancients. Unfortunately, things go wrong:

Courtyard
This appears to be some kind of courtyard in the centre of an Ancient dwelling. The building itself swings around to the north and west, terminating in a crumbling retaining wall due south. A smaller domed construction opens to the northeast, through a wide metal door (closed). To the east is a flat space that could bear further exploring.

You hear a high-pitched decelerating whine -- a dropship turbine in trouble -- from the northeast, followed by a dull roaring crash. Just in time, you duck and cover your eyes. Blue-white light etches across the landscape, then the gravity blast wave hits. Every molecule in your private universe shudders.

A minute later, you get to your feet, pain gnawing your body. Scratch one dropship; nobody could have survived that crash. Scratch your equipment. Now it's just you, your wits - and the Ancients. Hope you're as good a xenohistorian as you claimed at the Institute. Because unless you find some kind of way out of here, it could be months before a recovery team locates you.

The first paragraph is a description of the room in which you start, in this case a courtyard. That description will have clues about what you can do and where you can go, but I'll leave that for now. More importantly, the second and third paragraphs let you know what's going on and what you've got to do. You've crash-landed, and have to find a way off the planet.

So let's get started. The first thing I do when I enter a new room is see what items catch my eye. Let's take a look at the room description again, using the LOOK command.

>L
Courtyard
This appears to be some kind of courtyard in the centre of an Ancient dwelling. The building itself swings around to the north and west, terminating in a crumbling retaining wall due south. A smaller domed construction opens to the northeast, through a wide metal door (closed). To the east is a flat space that could bear further exploring.

You briefly catch a metallic glimmer from the top of the wall.

There are a couple of things I want to point out. First of all, I abbreviated LOOK as L. (You don't have to type it in all-caps like I did; I only did that to make sure you could tell it was "l" and not "1".) Second, I've put all of the items mentioned in the room's description in bold. Most of them won't be important, but occasionally you'll find something out by examining everything in a room. Third, notice that last sentence about a metallic glimmer? That's the author's way of indicating that there's something important about the wall. Let's oblige him.

>examine wall
The wall is at least three metres high, and appears impossible to climb. There seems to be a metallic object lodged in the vegetation just above the wall.

Aha. A clue. There's something metallic stuck up there, and it might be important. Let's take a closer look.

>examine glimmer
The object looks metallic, and out of place in the vegetation above the wall. It could - you hardly dare to hope - could be a piece of equipment from your pack, but you can't tell which one from this distance.

I believe we've stumbled on our first puzzle: how do we get that metallic object down from the wall. Maybe we can climb the wall, or the vegetation.

>climb wall
I don't know how to climb the southern wall.

>climb vegetation
The jungle vegetation isn't important.

Well, we probably won't be able to climb up and get that object. The phrase "I don't know how to..." is a standard TADS phrase, and means the author didn't code anything special for the wall. Sometimes you'll see "I don't think much is to be achieved by that" in other games -- it means the same thing. Phrases like "The [item] isn't important" and "Don't worry about the [item]" mean just that -- we don't have to worry about that item any more. That's the game's way of telling us that that item is just there for decoration. So we won't be able to get the item by pulling on the vegetation, or burning it, or anything.

Next | 1 | 2 | 3

About Us | Contact Us | Technical Info | History
Copyright © 1997-2010, Stephen Granade.