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LOTECHComp Begins!

© Mark Silcox

THE RATIONALE

I've always been a huge fan of those old Choose-Your-Own-Adventure and Fighting-Fantasy children's books. I was the first kid in our neighborhood to own THE CAVE OF TIME (the first CYOA book) and still harbor the blissful memory of the week after I bought it (age 11) when, for a few brief days in my life a seldom-repeated phenomenon occurred; I was Thought To Be Cool.

On a more serious note, I've become concerned that certain virtues I prize dearly in IF; the ability to write good English prose and to make the most of one's technical limitations; often seem to be downplayed by the good folk who write reviews of games on the web and discuss this stuff online. LOTECHComp will give IF writers in whom these virtues are paramount a chance for their moment in the sun.

Finally, I'd like to do my bit to popularize an IF writing tool that was was released about a year ago and has been virtually ignored by the community. Jon Ingold's ADVENTURE GAMEBOOK is a wonderful, endlessly fun invention that could serve many as a painless gateway to the world of IF writing, I think, if only it could get a bit more press.

THE RULES

Games submitted to LOTECHComp must have the following properties:

1) They must be playable in a Windows98 environment. By a technical dunce (i.e. me). Apologies to Mac-Prisoners, LINUX-heads and UNIX wallahs everywhere ; if the contest becomes an annual phenomenon I'll try to expand my horizons a bit in the future.

2) The game must be run entirely using a MULTIPLE CHOICE command parser. The ONLY INPUT needed from the player to win (or complete) the game must be the following:

i) Single-digit numbers (i.e. selections from a list of options).

ii) System commands: save, load, quit, etc.

iii) The NAMES of inventory items picked up along the way that the player can use (this small wrinkle is allowed principally in order to make use of an interesting feature of Jon Ingold's ADVENTURE GAMEBOOK program).

How might one put together such a game? There are a number of options. One might use a traditional IF writing system like TADS, ADRIFT or Inform. A breeze for the seasoned programmer.

Or one might choose to hard-code the game from scratch in C++, VB or some other widely used low-level coding language. This would allow for a few touches of customization that might help.

My own suggestion, though, is to make use of Jon Ingold's excellent and thus far almost totally unused GUI for writing multiple choice adventure games, ADVENTURE GAMEBOOK. It's completely intuitive, takes maybe twenty minutes to learn how to use, and is buckets of fun. You don't need any programming skills whatsoever to use it. I've included a link to it in my LINKS section of this site, and Jon has kindly offered to answer questions over e-mail about how the system works.