A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI (the-ventureweaver.itch.io)

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.

4K resolution text?! 4000 rooms?! Ah, 4 kilobytes.

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.

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.

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.

Looking forward to most posts having “No AI” tagged on. Definitely a huge plus.

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?

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.

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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!

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--

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.

You instantly got me when I read „Written by one human“

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...)

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.

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.