A text adventure scavenger hunt created with Inform 7. You can play it online at http://44westwind.com. Won Outstanding Feelies of 2022 - Player's Choice in the 2022 Interactive Fiction Competition.
There was one present left under the Christmas tree, a wooden box with a tag that said 'I open at the close.'
When my daughter turned thirteen, I made a scavenger hunt to her last Christmas present using a Marauder’s Map of our house. Use the map to find the clues and discover how to piece them together to find her present.
You can skip the text adventure version and explore an interactive version of the map at https://www.44westwind.com/map/. Or check out the photos at https://www.44westwind.com/photos/.
Check out the background and 'making of' for the physical version of this scavenger hunt at 2013 - 44 Marauders Map or read about the other scavenger hunts I've made on the main Scavenger Hunts page.
Warning! Spoilers ahead!
If you haven't played the game and would like to, go to 44westwind.com before reading further!
Volume 1 - The House, is a fairly standard example of making rooms and objects
in them. The one extension is Book 5 - Going to rooms. I dislike the frequently
tedious retracing of one's steps in most adventure games (long sequences of go south, go se, go n) and so, once the player has visited a room, they can at
any time thereafter type go to kitchen and you would skip all the other rooms.
If the room was next door, it would just report you going, if it was farther
away, the game reports "You run to the Kitchen as fast as you can...." Going to
rooms doesn't have any knowledge of the house and should move to Volume 3 as
it could be a standalone extension.
The House doesn't have any knowledge of the scavenger hunt, it was designed so that I could use it as the basis of future text adventure games.
Volume 2 - The Map in the Box is all the parts of the game that deals with the scavenger hunt. A great part of the scavenger hunt was interacting with the physical marauders map and I wanted to carry that forward in the text adventure version. The one clever bit of the real world puzzle was that you could put the snitches into the wind rose in any order and they would still reveal the final clue (as long as they were pointing in the correct direction). I wanted to copy that into the text adventure version and I was happy with my solution. See To say state of wind rose in Book 5 - The Wind Rose to see the details. Solving the wind rose puzzle is the first of three challenges and the solution to the wind rose is the clue to searching for the book of illumination. Once you find that, the last puzzle is finding a phone, calling it, and finding the ringing phone. Those are covered in Books 8 and 9.
One final trick was that when the player is holding the map, the room names add their label from the map. So Kitchen becomes Kitchen (marked House Elves Only on the map). That is handled in Book 10 - Map Effects.
Volume 3 - Miscelanea is a collection of relatively standalone modules that could be used with little alteration in another game:
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Book 1 - Looking at rooms and at directions: This allows the player to type
look down,look n, as well aslook out window. To truly make this stand- alone I should create a facing up description and a facing down description and set that for the different regions, areas or rooms. -
Book 2 - Listening Library - A simple extension for allowing the player to just 'listen' - which was needed for the phone search part of the puzzle but I decided to expand it to be able to hear the Christmas carols indoors and the waterfall (and frogs) outdoors. You can have sounds for rooms, regions and things by setting the sound of the (thing).
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Book 3 - NPCs - These are a bit special case to this game but could be adapted to others. The three NPCs are:
- Mama - the goal was to have Mama moving around the house on errands and occasionally show up, give some benign encouragement and move on.
- Cats - At the time, we had three cats with three personalities. There is a one in seven chance at any time that a random cat will show up to keep the player company. Oddly, one of the testers complained they couldn't kick the cat and so that was added (they run away and are gone from the game).
- Papa - The Papa character was created to provide an in-game way of getting hints. He is a faithful companion and follows you around the house. The faithful companion idea was useful enough to make it its own logic - Mama is a faithful companion even though she apparently leaves as soon as you see her.
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Book 4 - Contextual Hints - I wanted a hinting system that was both in-game and also not on rails, as the player can find the snitches in any order. None of the hinting extensions I saw did that (a close second was Aaron Reed's Inteligent Hinting). This module would need some cleaning up before it could be made into a stand- alone section. The Table of Contextual Hints contains hints for items by location, region, and tag - used for clearing the hint when the correct action was taken. Deciding on the next available hint is handled in Section 4 - Saying Hints. Effectively, the first hint that matches either the provided location or region or is touchable will be chosen. I use Inform's one of| stopping mechanism to provide increasingly more specific hints, ending with telling the player the literal command to type. (That is a stylistic choice, many authors and players eschew giving the outright answer.) I ran into an issue however. "One of" hints cannot be shared. So if you want to have the same of hints for multiple objects, that is, programatic "[one of][first computed hint][or][second hint][stopping]" check out Section 3 - Programatic 'One of - stopping'. Lastly, Section 9 routes mistakes to a prompt to the player to see if they want a hint.
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Book 4 - Exit listing is an alternative to Eric Eve's 'Exit Lister' in that it only lists exits when a player tries to go in a direction they cannot.