[HN Gopher] A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBa...
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A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI
Author : ATiredGoat
Score : 141 points
Date : 2025-10-12 06:13 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (the-ventureweaver.itch.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (the-ventureweaver.itch.io)
| ATiredGoat wrote:
| In an age where games are written by algorithms and dialogue is
| generated by AI, The Labyrinth of Time's Edge stands apart. It's
| the first open world "like" modern text adventure written
| entirely by a single human being, no AI, no procedural
| generation, no corporate fingerprints. Just words, code, and
| imagination. Built in pure QBasic, The Labyrinth of Time's Edge
| now spans over 3,900 handcrafted rooms which will be released in
| a week's time. Each one written line by line by one programmer-
| adventurer determined to prove that storytelling still belongs to
| people. Explore haunted villages, forgotten catacombs, and worlds
| born from candlelight and memory. It's free to play, made from
| love, obsession, and a refusal to let imagination be automated.
| XiZhao wrote:
| This comment reads like it was ai generated
| hatthew wrote:
| AI, or press release
| andrewflnr wrote:
| I guess part of what's annoying about LLMs is that they
| write like press releases.
| eru wrote:
| And like Americans.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| I know what you mean, but also, I only wish most of my
| fellow Americans even aspired to the command of English
| that LLMs possess.
| yodon wrote:
| >This comment reads like it was ai generated
|
| It must be amazing to feel that way about the totality of
| human literature. Might want to adjust your priors somewhat.
| cheschire wrote:
| Ehh, I think GP was saying it doesn't fit with the tone of
| a message board reply, so it seems cut and paste from some
| outside place. Either a press release, a review snippet, or
| AI.
| citizenkeen wrote:
| > It's the first open world "like" modern text adventure
| written entirely by a single human being
|
| This rings false
| armitron wrote:
| It is a gross exaggeration. There are far better modern text
| adventures out there written by one person (ie see the games
| of Andrew Plotkin).
|
| There's minimal if any interactivity in this "game" and I
| deleted it after 10 minutes of one screen with one line of
| text after another.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Maybe "human generated" is your marketing hook, but I
| personally don't care what the source of something is, I care
| about the quality.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Well, the current rule of thumb, speaking generally, is that
| human work is of a much higher quality than AI work, so the
| original comment seems fair.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| You realize that's the same arguments racists use for their
| racism, right?
|
| Also, as fast as models are improving it's not a useful
| heuristic anyhow.
| lukas099 wrote:
| Well that escalated quickly.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The degree isn't the point here, it's the sameness of
| logic. I wasn't disparaging him, but the pattern of
| thought.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > You realize that's the same arguments racists use for
| their racism, right?
|
| Attempting to use the legacy of actual maligned minority
| groups to justify your sense of outrage that people
| aren't interested in products you weren't interested
| enough in producing to actually produce is disgusting.
|
| > Also, as fast as models are improving it's not a useful
| heuristic anyhow.
|
| They aren't improving, not particularly. They finally got
| the video generators to kiiind ooooof maintain a
| character's appearance between shots. Usually.
|
| AI is spottable, often obvious, looks cheap, lacks
| intent, and boring. If you actually want to create,
| that's great. I suggest you do what every human before
| you did, and invest the time and effort to learn a craft
| with which to do so. If you aren't interested in doing
| that, that's completely fine, but I am conversely
| uninterested in viewing whatever you are uninterested in
| making.
|
| Instead of automating creativity, I suggest we automate
| CEOs and managers. They don't do much besides generate
| pages upon pages of vacuous nothing and LLM's are great
| at that, and they're FAR more expensive for our
| enterprises than graphic designers.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The thing that is giving the right juice is that they can
| hold up meritocracy and victory of ideas under fair
| competition in response to identity politics. If we just
| framed things in terms of fighting poverty and systemic
| bias instead of reparations they wouldn't have a leg to
| stand on. We're giving them the ammunition they're
| blowing holes in us with.
|
| Human vs AI is the same debate. No matter how good AI is,
| nothing is stopping you from creating. People have
| freedom of choice in terms of what they can consume, and
| if AI is a better creator than you, why should you make
| people's experiences worse by ramming your mediocrity
| down their throat with the battle cry of "human made"?
| You don't deserve an audience just because you're made of
| meat.
|
| If you hate slop, hate it because it's bad, and hate
| human slop equally.
|
| For reference, I'm a published artist and I'm currently
| querying for a manuscript. I use AI to scaffold projects
| quickly to ~80% then finish it myself, just like the the
| masters of the Italian renaissance did with apprentices.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > The thing that is giving the right juice is that they
| can hold up meritocracy and victory of ideas under fair
| competition in response to identity politics.
|
| They can hold the _MYTHS_ of meritocracy and victory of
| ideas under fair competition, because that 's what they
| are. They are popularly held and by a majority of the
| country I fear, but myths they remain. You walk around
| the board room of any major company in the country, and
| you show me a meritocracy. The new rich, such as they
| are, were largely a product of the tech industry boom,
| and none of them are particularly skilled, instead what
| they had was LUCK. Luck to be starting companies at a
| particular time in history in which, if you hit the
| threshold of network effects and popularity, you could
| become an utterly unstoppable juggernaut of business, by
| sheer scale.
|
| Now, that's not a NOTHING achievement, to be clear, but
| it is not merit by ones personal efforts. Facebook today
| does not exist as the monolith it does because Fuckerburg
| was just the rockstar of rockstar coders. He is, by most
| accounts, pretty mediocre in fact, and his website was
| built so he and the other failsons of his college class
| could rate the looks of their female classmates. And we
| know this is true, because it is not fucking possible to
| "hustle" hard enough to be a billionare. If you disagree,
| give away everything you have, start from nothing, and go
| prove me wrong. Go become a billionaire from zero and if
| you do, I will steam my Macbook and eat it in one
| sitting, and publish the video publicly.
|
| And that's just NEW industry. OLD industry is stuffed to
| the fucking gills with the mediocre offspring of the
| previous generations most lucky business titans. Many of
| whom, for emphasis, did make solid business decisions,
| many of which could also be classified as evil, but
| that's neither here nor there. Many of our politicians
| similarly have storied pasts full of skeletons, from
| scandals to failed businesses to dead-end careers.
| "Failing up" is a concept because meritocracy is
| horseshit.
|
| > Human vs AI is the same debate. No matter how good AI
| is, nothing is stopping you from creating.
|
| I made no such claim.
|
| > People have freedom of choice in terms of what they can
| consume, and if AI is a better creator than you, why
| should you make people's experiences worse by ramming
| your mediocrity down their throat with the battle cry of
| "human made"? You don't deserve an audience just because
| you're made of meat.
|
| What on earth does this even mean? I didn't say anything
| about anyone else. I have said, though I do think a
| preponderance of people agree with me, that I am not
| interested in consuming things created by people who do
| not care about them enough to create them, and
| fundamentally, making stuff with AI is not creation. If
| you disagree with that assertion, you're free to make
| that case, but I advocated nothing outside of my own
| personal bounds of taste.
|
| > If you hate slop, hate it because it's bad, and hate
| human slop equally.
|
| Can and do!
|
| > For reference, I'm a published artist
|
| No you're not. And I know that because when you click
| through to your profile, you self identify as the CEO of
| a company called Sibylline Software, which is incorrect,
| that's Justin Crump, and you say your name is Nathan. I
| found info on you on your website though, but the rest of
| said website is nothing but corporate fluff about AI and
| enterprise integration and yadda yadda, very unimpressive
| stuff, and trying to find anything about what your
| company is allegedly doing or making is difficult both
| because you're one letter off of a MUCH larger and more
| successful business, and even googling for your spelling
| in particular brings up absolutely nothing apart from
| your business website and a podcast episode. And I wasn't
| able to find any art whatsoever.
|
| Also you spelled your own company's name wrong in your
| profile. Assuming you are Nathan Rice. At this point I
| feel you're a highly dishonest interlocutor and I have no
| clue how much credibility to assign anything you say.
|
| There is a Nathan Rice who's involved in movies? But he
| looks completely different to you in his photos.
|
| > I use AI to scaffold projects quickly to ~80% then
| finish it myself,
|
| As an admittedly amateur artist with a much smaller
| platform: I would never call 80% of ANYTHING I make a
| "scaffold." If AI is generating 80% of your final
| product, I consider that AI generated and I wouldn't be
| interested, and I would happily Pepsi challenge that if
| you're so inclined to provide samples.
|
| Edit: Oh, no, I'm wrong, you did just spell it EXACTLY
| like the other Sybilline Software. Oh well I cannot
| possibly rewrite this comment AGAIN, this rabbit hole has
| sucked up so much of my time today, amusing as it is.
| Enjoy your AI business I'm sure you'll be partying with
| Bezos in like 2 years.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| You spent all those words just to come back to the
| original point: you are prejudiced against the source of
| the things you consume.
|
| If you want to call out the fact that I'm published I can
| go scan my contract with US Games Systems, just say the
| word buddy.
|
| If you ever come back to this message, I made this just
| with some art I've been working on over the last few
| days: https://imgur.com/a/Jw1Twbs Hit me back with your
| artistic output over the last 3 days kthxbai
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| No kidding. I would daresay most people are. It's kinda
| the core issue in things like fair trade coffee, being
| upset about fast fashion, organic foods... hell I think
| you'd be hard pressed to find any kind of widespread
| consumer movement that doesn't involve that. Discernment
| is not discrimination and no amount of whining is going
| to change that.
|
| And I've got to say, an artist signaling legitimacy by
| offering to scan a contract instead of sharing the art,
| paired with a broken link as your mic-drop moment? That's
| a chef's kiss I couldn't script if I tried, even with AI.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| You want me to share the art that I'm under contract for,
| that someone has paid for? Listen to yourself.
|
| Turns out Imgur has content filters that are beyond
| stupid, male partial nudity with man boobs and Trump &
| Hitler doing a drag duet is too art for virgin internet
| eyes.
|
| Also, stop talking shit and show me your recent art
| output.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| > games are written by algorithms and dialogue is generated by
| AI
|
| I don't think we're there quite yet, and hopefully we never
| will be. A tiny minority of games, maybe.
| xnx wrote:
| 4K resolution text?! 4000 rooms?! Ah, 4 kilobytes.
| Retz4o4 wrote:
| lol no
| hatthew wrote:
| From the article, 4000 separate ingame rooms to explore
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Based on the hyphen, we know "4k-room" is a compound adjective.
| There's no basis to infer that 4k might refer to resolution or
| kilobytes.
| gerdesj wrote:
| Give your preferred AI agent internet search powers and look up
| how Elite managed to cram rather a lot of game into a nominal
| 64KB on a C64 or 32KB on a BBC model B.
|
| That's a first person 3D space craft simulation with a very
| impressive Heads Up Display with vector graphics (unfilled on BBC
| and C64, filled on PC). It is also a commodity trading game to
| improve your spaceship etc and with a massive amount of variety
| in a binary smaller than an empty Word doc. Also: joystick and
| keyboard drivers and so on.
|
| It's quite a tale.
| antod wrote:
| It sure was. Although my favourite Elite port was the Amiga
| one.
|
| Another one I was amazed by was Tomahawk on the Spectrum. A
| wireframe helicopter gunship flight sim with live ground
| campaign happening around you in 48k.
| tdeck wrote:
| Also reminds me of how they fit Pitfall into 4k. A lot simpler
| game but the platform was also much more limited. This is a
| great talk for those who love such things:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MBT1OK6VAIU
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Pitfall is one of those technologies that the more you learn
| about how it works the more you become convinced it's
| actually impossible.
|
| GPS is another one (in particular the signal strength seems
| far too low).
| arscan wrote:
| The first program I ever wrote was a choose your own adventure, I
| _think_ written on my family's IBM PC jr in Basic. It's pretty
| amazing how far a kid can get with GOTO statements and a lot of
| patience. But for some reason I couldn't (or didn't know how to)
| save it, so I'd work on it all day, have my sister and mom play
| it, and then shut off the computer thus losing my days work.
|
| Or at least, that's how I remember it. It's been a good 40 years
| though and I wouldn't be surprised if reality was quite a bit
| different.
|
| Edit: I've been thinking about this a bit and honestly my
| motivation for writing software hasn't really changed. The users,
| sure, but not the motivation. It's just thrilling to share things
| I built with other people.
| mromanuk wrote:
| I made a game in the 80s in my Commodore 128, was a super
| rudimentary maze, you moved the sprite and need to reach the
| center of the maze. That was it. It was very basic, but I was
| proud and showed it to some folks. I'd love to see the code and
| game now.
| technothrasher wrote:
| I made some text adventures in elementary school on the
| school's Apple II machines in the early 80's after playing
| Scott Adams' games (as a side note, it was amazing to be able
| to tell him directly many years later how much he influenced my
| learning to program). Anyway, a few years after I graduated
| from the school, I went back to visit, and some kids figured
| out it was me who's adventures they'd been playing and asked
| how to get past the one point in one that they couldn't figure
| out. I had to tell them, much to their disappointment, that I
| hadn't actually finished that game.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Similar background here. The public library had Apple II
| machines and I became quite enamored with making proto-text
| adventures in Applesoft BASIC. Because you had to sign-up for
| time I wrote a lot of my programs longhand on nth generation
| photocopies of "program template" sheets that they handed out
| at the library (lined paper with columns for line numbers,
| statements, comments, etc).
|
| The spaghetti code was astounding, and I remember squeezing
| line numbers between existing code-- adding a "31 GOTO 40" so I
| could squeeze a "room" into lines 32-39.
|
| I never did grok the idea of building an "engine". Mostly I had
| PRINTs, INPUTs, and IF/GOTOs.
| arscan wrote:
| Love it! It really is a good first program to write as a kid
| (at least those from a certain generation).
|
| And my memory might be from our Apple 2gs and AppleScript,
| actually (hence my caveat in the comment). But I'm sure the
| program was just PRINTs, INPUTs, IFs and GOTOs :)
| Telemakhos wrote:
| One of the most humbling moments in my life was learning from
| a friend what a object was, and how that differed from GOTO
| statements. I had already done something similar by inventing
| abstraction, when I figured out that I could pre-define
| certain musical notes and then use those defined notes more
| simply in my BASIC code. I had not, however, made the leap
| between re-using notes and re-using rooms in a text
| adventure. That realization that all re-used things can be
| abstracted was formative, and I am very thankful to my friend
| for having explained what he was doing with rooms. At some
| level, I regret that I learned BASIC before an object-
| oriented language; at another, I'm glad that I did, because
| my training in stupidity made very obvious to me my
| shortcoming in logic when I learned a better way.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I'm jealous of your experience. That sounds very cool.
|
| Looking back I wish I'd had a mentor. I think I would have
| accomplished so much more if I'd had somebody to offer some
| guidance and gentle direction.
| vunderba wrote:
| By the time I was a kid, most of the x86 computers I was
| exposed to were running DOS with the included QBasic IDE so I
| never had to worry about things like this.
|
| However, we had old stacks of Compute magazine [1] lying
| around with BASIC source games printed out - and I remember
| initially being confused as to why all the line numbers were
| separated by intervals of 10...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compute!
| tkrn wrote:
| >The spaghetti code was astounding, and I remember squeezing
| line numbers between existing code-- adding a "31 GOTO 40" so
| I could squeeze a "room" into lines 32-39.
|
| I spent too many nights trying to implement complex text
| adventures in Commodore 64 Basic and I'm sure that instead of
| permanently damaging me (at least in the sense that Dijkstra
| meant) it just made me appreciate more all the abstractions
| later languages introduced to me.
| vunderba wrote:
| When I was first introduced to BASIC in elementary school, I
| was spending a lazy afternoon reading in the built-in QBasic
| docs (being able to hit F1 and get immediate help is still one
| of the coolest things ever IMHO) about the _SOUND_ keyword,
| which let you set a frequency and duration.
|
| I remember irritating the hell out of my parents (and our dog)
| with it until one day, by accident, I noticed they couldn't
| hear the tone anymore. The frequency was somewhere in the range
| of 15-20 kHz IIRC.
|
| So I wrote a "PASSWORD.BAS" source that would play that high
| pitched sound in short, one-tick intervals continuously while
| polling the keyboard for input but then stop after a random
| amount of time. To authenticate, the user had to hit the
| spacebar within a one second window of the sound's termination.
| Hitting the spacebar too early would also result in access
| denied. Fun times!
| analog8374 wrote:
| I used to mess with sound on my commodore 64. 3 voices. ASDR.
| Square, sine, triangle. Chords were frequencies with common
| factors. The world of strange sounds is vast.
| vunderba wrote:
| Nice! I still love that one of the ways that C64 composers
| worked around the limitations of 3 independent sound
| channels was to use a single voice to simulate a chord by
| playing the triad of notes in an continual extremely rapid
| arpeggiation.
|
| Incidentally, if you're ever interested in playing around
| with one again, there's a really accurate VST emulator
| called Chipsynth C64 [1].
|
| [1] https://www.plogue.com/products/chipsynth-c64.html
| rectang wrote:
| When I was in Jr. High, we had an Atari 400. Mostly I used it
| to play Missile Command and Star Raiders, but it also came with
| a BASIC cartridge.
|
| In the back of the manual were four BASIC programs. The first
| three were very simple, stuff like a loop that prints your name
| 10 times and then exits.
|
| The last program balanced your checkbook. It was 4 pages long.
| I laboriously typed it in, hunt-and-peck style, which took
| hours... then I hit "run".
|
| Nothing.
|
| I couldn't debug it. Not only did I not really understand
| software, I didn't have a checkbook -- hell I didn't even know
| what "balance your checkbook" meant.
|
| We didn't have the exorbitantly expensive Atari floppy disk
| drive, nor the cassette drive, so I couldn't save my work.
| Still, I left that BASIC cartridge in there for several days,
| foregoing my games, because I didn't want to lose my
| investment.
|
| Eventually, I turned off the computer and the program
| disappeared forever.
|
| I didn't program again for 20 years.
| DrSiemer wrote:
| In my experience, a core skill of programmers is that they
| are people who are able to deal with setbacks and frustration
| in a good way. Those come with the territory.
|
| I've always wondered if there is a correlation between
| developers and people that can enjoy tough but fair games
| like Super Meat Boy because of this.
| rectang wrote:
| Hmm, I've had a highly successful career in software
| despite getting derailed and starting late, so maybe not
| the best example haha.
|
| I agree that resilience is important, but in my experience
| it emerges from a complex mix of temperament, environment,
| structural advantages, and mentoring, rather than being
| intrinsic to the individual. For illustration: I've trained
| a bunch of people from nothing on software and I always
| prioritized helping them find a project they cared about,
| because that motivation was what would power the through
| the inevitable frustrations.
|
| Maybe if the Atari manual had taught me how to write a
| branching adventure game rather than a checkbook-balancing
| program, I would have stuck with programming back then. But
| I'm not dissatisfied with the path my life took.
| NBJack wrote:
| I got into coding at home when I realized ctrl-break gave me a
| BASIC command prompt on my Apple //c. It was really cool, and I
| spent a lot of time learning to code. There was one small
| problem: doing so on startup meant I didn't get a DOS. In other
| words, every program I wrote like that meant I couldn't keep
| it.
|
| I eventually learned to get a ProDOS disk setup, and save my
| work, but it was still fun.
| kqr wrote:
| It was the same for me, except I grew up slightly later and did
| it with HTML documents and hyperlinks! (And in one case, I even
| think I got some help with an imagemap. Clicking the little
| hole in the foundation to the house led to an easter egg.)
| zem wrote:
| that's pretty awesome, a real labour of love. wonder how hard it
| would be to convert to a MUD so that people could wander around
| the world together.
| gigatree wrote:
| Looking forward to most posts having "No AI" tagged on.
| Definitely a huge plus.
| BiraIgnacio wrote:
| This makes me wonder if there will be a time when "No AI" will
| be considered up-scale (of sorts) like hand-sewn clothes or
| artisan bread
| nomel wrote:
| You might like Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age".
| eru wrote:
| And, of course, it will be inferior to what the machines
| make.
|
| Just like machine created cutlery is essentially perfect, but
| human smithed cutlery will have lots of small imperfections.
| whtrbt wrote:
| In what way do those imperfections make something like
| cutlery inferior?
| nomel wrote:
| I think there are many more examples of his point. Food,
| for example. McDonalds famously adds non-uniformity,
| scorch marks, etc to their bread and meat to make it
| appear as if it wasn't manufactured within small
| dimensional tolerances.
| conception wrote:
| It won't always be inferior. Some items are just not
| profitable or too bespoke for mass production.
| pjmlp wrote:
| And yet many people pay small fortunes to get those small
| imperfections instead of the machine ones, nowadays
| considered collection items.
| eru wrote:
| Yes, humans pay for all kinds of interesting quirks.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Cutlery is, of course, a very different thing from artistic
| works. Has a machine ever created cutlery _as beautiful_ as
| a human being can?
| eru wrote:
| Well, conventionally a human being designs the cutlery,
| and a machine produces to that design.
|
| And yes, they can be quite pretty.
|
| What you see as the absolutely most beautify fork is in
| the eye of the beholder, of course.
| fennecbutt wrote:
| Handmade cutlery is an artistic work. Machine made
| cutlery is an artistic work.
|
| Remember, the benchmark for art is a banana taped to a
| wall.
| defrost wrote:
| the benchmark for art is _the first_ banana taped to a
| wall.
| gigatree wrote:
| Yeah, I imagine "hand-coded" will be a common phrase on a lot
| of repos soon
| _blaise_ wrote:
| All of the code will be handcrafted, bespoke and artisanal.
| Written in heirloom editors. The comments could be
| described as ambrosial, whilst the code reads in a piquant
| and succulent manner.
| baobun wrote:
| "brain-coded" is where it's at.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Maybe one day but, right now, I think the onus is on the
| minority of AI repos to declare it rather than the other
| way round.
| gigatree wrote:
| Agree, but they have no incentive to. I always tell
| Claude to remove its attribution from commits because
| it's not a great signal.
| _def wrote:
| Of course you are free to do that, but doesn't that make
| the situation worse for everyone?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yes, like proper cooking became slow food, we will get slow
| programming.
| helpfulclippy wrote:
| I'm surprised to see a QBasic game with 1GHz CPU and 512MB RAM
| required! Is that because the game needs it, or because that's
| what it takes to even run a modern OS with dosbox or something?
| bdcravens wrote:
| The latter I assume. The game does load the text file into
| memory, so the old 640kb machines would probably struggle, but
| otherwise, it looks like it should run well enough on a 386 (or
| even a 286, where I wrote my first QBasic scripts, though they
| were nowhere nearly as polished)
| vunderba wrote:
| It's because it's not written in QBasic. It's written in a
| _variant_ of QBasic called QB64 [1] - a spiritual successor to
| Microsoft 's QBasic intended to run on modern 64-bit machines.
|
| I went over the BAS source the last time this was posted a few
| weeks back and it has a lot of keywords that are specific to
| QB64 so unfortunately you can't run this on a true DOS machine
| (or DosBox).
|
| [1] https://qb64.com
| bsammon wrote:
| However, it _should_ be playable on Linux or OSX, both of
| which are (reportedly) supported by QB64.
| egypturnash wrote:
| If you are trying to beat the record for "most rooms in a text
| adventure", I'm afraid you've got a long way to go - Level 9's
| _Snowball_ has more than 7k rooms.
| nomel wrote:
| Looks like marketing [1].
|
| > The game is advertised as having more than 7.000 locations.
| In reality there are about 200 unique locations and the rest is
| part of a maze with exact locations.
|
| [1] https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/6993/ZX-
| Spectrum/Snowb...
| selcuka wrote:
| > over 6800 of these rooms are essentially identical. Snowball
| is used in this context as the ultimate illustration of the
| absurdities of old-school adventures, with their mazes and
| sprawling geographies full of corridors and empty rooms. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.filfre.net/2013/06/snowball/
| Jemaclus wrote:
| IIRC, AvatarMUD (avatar.outland.org) has 20,000+ rooms in it.
| It's been a long time since I played, but it's absolutely
| massive!
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Yah, aardwolf (the one o played in ancient times) apparently
| has 35,000 rooms.
|
| Collaborative building over decades adds up!
| astrobe_ wrote:
| Yes, I remembered that some MUDs touted much more rooms. I've
| found Aarchon (15K) [1] and SlothMUD (23K) [2]. And that's
| just the number of rooms, the other numbers (8K mobs, 7K
| items, 12K NPCs) are massive as well.
|
| But big MUDs usually have "builder" teams so the comparison
| is unfair. However, these numbers have hardly been matched by
| game studios - WoW or Runescape comes to mind. And then
| there's Dwarf Fortress which reaches the infinite in some
| categories thanks to procedural generation.
|
| [1] https://www.aarchonmud.com/arc/features
|
| [2] https://www.mudportal.com/listings/by-genre/hack-
| slash/item/...
| droolboy wrote:
| When I was in my first year of junior high they had formal
| dances. But for the (cooler) nerdy kids with no dates they opened
| up the computer room. One of the older kids had a big floppy he
| brought from home. On it he had a simple QBasic RPG. If you ran
| into an enemy it would start an RPG battle and all the graphics
| were made from 2D arrays. It was awesome! It blew my mind and I
| spent the rest of the year learning and building my own. Great
| times! Thanks!
| skopje wrote:
| I downloaded the rooms.txt file and the word "handcrafted" is
| doing some heavy lifting. It's like one sentence per room. Did I
| miss something? I don't want to play the game (I hate text
| adventures), but I want an idea of how much effort went into
| this.
|
| Example:
|
| --ROOM 22 START-- Village of Oathmoor 23,0,0,21 You find yourself
| in a narrow, dimly lit alley. An ELDERLY WOMAN sits perched on a
| broken stool, her piercing gaze fixed on you with an unsettling
| intensity. --ROOM 22 END-- --ROOM 23 START-- Village of Oathmoor
| 24,22,0,0 The road ahead begins to slope gently upward, winding
| its way past abandoned, barren buildings whose windows gape like
| empty eyes. --ROOM 23 END-- --ROOM 24 START-- Village of Oathmoor
| 0,23,25,0 The eerie stillness around you is oppressive, broken
| only by the creeping sensation of unseen eyes upon you. A chill
| snakes down your spine. --ROOM 24 END-- --ROOM 25 START-- Village
| of Oathmoor 26,0,0,24 A faint melody drifts toward you, its
| haunting notes carried on the breeze. The aroma of a meal cooking
| over a distant fire stirs both hunger and curiosity. --ROOM 25
| END-- --ROOM 26 START-- Village of Oathmoor 27,25,0,0 You stumble
| upon a makeshift camp where people dance in defiance of their
| sorrows. The leader of this ragtag group locks eyes with you,
| their expression unreadable. --ROOM 26 END--
| jjmarr wrote:
| Presumably it's similar to Soda Drinker Pro, which is 102
| rooms, each with terrible MS paint drawings, in which you drink
| a soda and walk around for a minute or two.
|
| https://youtu.be/C40kq29Emn0
| skopje wrote:
| This is so awful it's awesome. Thanks!
| arscan wrote:
| Even if it's only 1 sentence per room (it's not), that's still
| 4000 sentences. I'd guess this is at least a few hundred pages
| of written work (without downloading it and just based on what
| you've shared). That seems pretty substantial to me.
|
| Not sure what the length has to do with handcraftedness though.
| This comment is handcrafted even if it is short.
| kqr wrote:
| Going by the sample rooms above, (27, 21, 24, 28, 27) words
| multiplied by 4000 rooms divided by 350-450 words per page
| yields 200-300 pages indeed. But if it's mainly exposition
| and not interactable I can see how it would become dull
| reading quickly.
| armitron wrote:
| It is boring, there's minimal interactivity. Quite a long
| way from the better text adventures out there.
| kbelder wrote:
| Yes, but "Quantity has a quality all its own". Maybe a
| massive enough environment can be interesting despite
| being static.
|
| (This led me down a rabbit hole trying to find a source
| for that quote. It seems to be mostly, and falsely,
| attributed to Stalin.)
| fasbiner wrote:
| I think you're saying what the average person is thinking but
| is worried about being impolite. You are of course correct: it
| is the kind of fact about a game that non-gamers might still
| mistake for quality or depth.
|
| The horseshoe theory of ai generation tells us that
| handcrafting and content generation extremism end up very close
| to each other: https://emshort.blog/2016/09/21/bowls-of-
| oatmeal-and-text-ge...
|
| The fact that something is generated or hand-crafted is not
| interesting by itself no matter how much people try to pretend
| otherwise for social cohesion purposes. Mediocre thing + no AI
| and Mediocre thing + AI seem to be orthogonal to what people
| actually care about at the end of the day.
| chii wrote:
| I think it's more that the 'no ai' moniker is an advertising
| gimmick - similar to how food/produce being advertised as
| organic and naturally grown, or a piece of craft being
| handmade (as opposed to machine made).
| quuxplusone wrote:
| That Emily Short blog post is a good read, but I didn't find
| that it helped me learn what is "the horseshoe theory of AI
| generation" nor in what sense handcrafting should end up
| close to procgen or anything else. Can you elaborate and/or
| point to something that does?
| deadbabe wrote:
| A text adventure of all things seems like it'd be great for AI
| though. You could have natural open ended conversations with NPCs
| to learn whatever they can tell you about the world, for example.
| This is one area where human generated content isn't really
| better, you'd just end up with boring dialog trees to traverse.
| vunderba wrote:
| AI Dungeon was an open-ended interactive fiction game powered
| by GPT-2 that went viral back in 2019.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Dungeon
|
| Where AI has the power to shine isn't necessarily in the
| creation of novel stories, but in the capacity to act as a
| significantly more powerful and flexible text parser for player
| input.
|
| _Get ye flask and all that..._
| deadbabe wrote:
| _Beat the game_
| ianbicking wrote:
| Text adventures and AI-driven interactions are surprisingly
| different I've found...
| https://ianbicking.org/blog/2025/07/intra-llm-text-adventure -
| still not sure what the right fusion might be.
| tkrn wrote:
| I could see LLMs being useful as just an UI layer on top of
| traditional interactive fiction engines? Having a voice-
| operated IF assistant/narrator paired with tools for note
| taking and such could offer an accessible alternative
| interface to the large existing IF library (or maybe
| something like that exists already?).
|
| Taken further the assistant's role could be expanded with
| greater autonomy. Games could include metadata and authors
| hints & directives for the narrator. Or a limited interface
| for manipulating the game state and shifting the traditional
| IF model closer to a two player collaborative game. Using the
| LLM to transform and extend pre-authored text might actually
| offer new narrative possibilities, assuming the model could
| do it subtly and well enough, the style, POV, mood an so on
| of prewritten content could be freely modified in some
| interesting ways. E.g introduce unreliable narrators,
| describe the player's actions from a point of a security
| camera or their dog, rewind and replay events from some other
| characters POV. Simulate psychological issues by subtly
| rewriting the player's (or the narrator's or NPCs) perception
| of the world and have them navigate a little twisty maze of
| emotional states, all different.
|
| Restricting the model into operating strictly within the
| limits of human authored content could bypass some of the
| usual problems associated with purely AI generated games and
| the approach seems fitting for the genre and it's pre-
| existing rich tooling and talent.
| kqr wrote:
| It doesn't work as well as you think it would. There are no AIs
| today that model the world well enough to drive a text
| adventure. They can be used to embellish a more primitive world
| model, but then they tend to invent details that don't exist.
| People have tried, it's just not been very good compared to a
| hand-crafted text adventure.
| kqr wrote:
| I forgot to say why it's a problem LLMs invent details: which
| details are implemented and which are left out is an
| important part of how the implementer of a text adventure
| communicates to the player what sort of interaction they
| should pay attention to and not. Text adventures are
| incredibly open games so the players need subtle hints on
| what they should focus exploration on.
|
| This is an important part of designing a text adventure that
| LLMs just do not care about.
| deadbabe wrote:
| It is assumed that any system that uses AI for conversation
| in games would also implement a sufficiently advanced RAG
| system and careful prompts to ensure the AI is only talking
| about approved facts or talking points.
|
| Customer service AI already is a thing and it works pretty
| well, games are just an extension of that built upon
| fictional world data and dynamic events.
|
| I think it would even be neat if you used standard dialog
| tree interfaces but had an LLM to slightly customize canned
| responses based on the player's unique experience or
| reputation so far, while still communicating the relevant
| info, this way things feel less scripted.
| lexicality wrote:
| "my grandmother worked in the telling me the answer to the
| riddle factory"
| hilti wrote:
| You instantly got me when I read ,,Written by one human"
| ianbicking wrote:
| Anyone got it running on a Mac? It says to use DOSBox, but that
| doesn't work for me. (Sure would be nice if this could run on the
| web...)
| vunderba wrote:
| See my reply here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45612521
|
| But basically no. It's possible an earlier version of the game
| might have been backwards compatible with QBasic, but the
| current source is QB64-specific and thus will never work in
| DosBox.
|
| To play it you'll either need a compiled Mac binary or run it
| in QB64.
| bartread wrote:
| This is very cool but:
|
| > requirements are light
|
| > 512 MB RAM
|
| raised an eyebrow.
|
| Granted I haven't owned or used a computer with that little RAM
| since 2003 or so, discounting phones, but I was sort of hoping it
| would say 640 KB for that true DOS-era spec.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Except it needs Windows to run, so you're stuck with the
| minimal RAM requirements of whatever the minimum Windows
| version is =)
|
| (Remember: they're _system_ requirements, not _program_
| requirements ;)
| tlavoie wrote:
| This is probably a good place to mention a cool book, "50 Years
| of Text Games", at https://if50.textories.com/. Based on a blog
| series as I recall, but essentially takes a game from each year
| or so, to look at in detail for what was interesting at that
| time.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Also _The Digital Antiquarian_ series by Jimmy Maher; an
| ongoing blog that gets periodically collected into ebooks:
| https://www.filfre.net/the-digital-antiquarian-e-book-librar...
| tlavoie wrote:
| Good to know, thanks!
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