The aesthetics does not make for easy reading. Never was interested in text adventures in the first place but the blurriness made me quit the game faster than I would have.
Nice idea, but can you allow folks to turn off the fake flickering/display faults. It's hugely distracting. Also the CGA style font is kinda hard to read, perhaps you could allow folks to:
- change the font
- adjust the brightness and contrast
Back in the day when I was a mini-computer engineer our terminal screens were much nicer and crisp.
Well, my first instinct on the design puzzle was something among the lines of http://xkcd.com/149/
I was a little surprised to get a "no such command" error, especially after finding out the actual solution...
Slightly sad to see that "ask man about emacs" didn't work. I was pretty amused by the "Don't know anything about that" when queried about "open source", though.
"look at tunnel" should work after opening the tunnel.
I love the background changes.
Why does "get container" not work? The response didn't give a reason.
"Welcome to the developer console; you were kind of expected." made me laugh.
This is just a pet peeve of mine. I don't understand why you ask "Are you sure you want to leave this page" when I click back, or try to close the tab. I am sure - that's why I tried to leave.
Is it normal for text adventures you just have to try random stuff?
I had no clue how to get design.
I thought I had missed a clue from the developer maybe.
Turned out I just needed to enter a command that was not introduced before, or listed in the help page.
It was normal 30 years ago, as a cheap way to cut development time and pad play time. Parser technology and usability expectations have improved since then, but this piece is too committed to its retro aesthetic to care.
For folks that haven't played text adventures in a long time, check out the annual interactive fiction competition winners for some great modern ones: http://www.ifcomp.org. They're meant to be played in about an hour, have hints, and usually don't rely on cheap deaths or other frustrating tropes of old games.
It's traditional in text adventures that you infer un-helped verbs from the text (that is, if the verb is clued at all): here the wizard instructs you to 'say' the answer.
I opened dev tools and deactivated the text-shadow property in .terminal-window (also found the blur horrible.)
Edit: Hmm, after playing a little, the shadow is in more places... Already did too much js and css (and go) today to bother, so leaving it for tomorrow.
The ancient cloud guru URL thing.. a proxy here in the way stripped out the answer, I had to curl through tor. go figure.
edit: just finished. I laughed at some bits, all in all I enjoyed it. I facepalmed when I realised I needed chmod (which I had to look at jsbeautified app.js to get the hint - I was trying su/sudo!).
> bug I can't cut-and-paste the hashed password. That sucks.
> bug I can't cut-and-paste the ascii code. There is no way I am typing all that in by eye.
> bugfix If I highlight the code and then right-click before letting go of the mouse I can copy
Selecting the text also makes it available for middle-click paste on Linux/UNIX platforms. You can also hit Ctrl-C before releasing the mouse button. But yes, text selection ought to work normally.
50 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadI tried it for an LD a while back but http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Th... didn't really get the text itself to look like code from a squint test, nor get syntax completion finished in time.
I've since been shown a nice IRSSI theme too: http://irssi.org/themefiles/c0ders.png
There should probably be a switch to turn off the bad screen effects.
- change the font
- adjust the brightness and contrast
Back in the day when I was a mini-computer engineer our terminal screens were much nicer and crisp.
Should I stick a "Show HN" the next time I find something? I'm hesitant to do so since I wasn't the one who wrote it.
"look at tunnel" should work after opening the tunnel.
I love the background changes.
Why does "get container" not work? The response didn't give a reason.
"Welcome to the developer console; you were kind of expected." made me laugh.
...why can I deploy the beard?
The music at the end was unexpected.
"get container" should give some feedback that you're not able to pick it up, so that'd be a bug then.
Deploying the unix beard was a bug initially, but I left it in because I thought it was kind of funny.
It said I couldn't pick it up; it didn't describe, in-character, why.
I for one loved the green on black. But thats probably because I actually used green on black terminals back in my youth...
Gj Carl-Petter and Juha!
edit: fixed typo
I had no clue how to get design. I thought I had missed a clue from the developer maybe. Turned out I just needed to enter a command that was not introduced before, or listed in the help page.
That's a strategy that works with many error messages in many programs, not just in this game.
Also, I'd stop the blurring effect after a while, that really grated on me. I'd love to have time to try it properly.
For folks that haven't played text adventures in a long time, check out the annual interactive fiction competition winners for some great modern ones: http://www.ifcomp.org. They're meant to be played in about an hour, have hints, and usually don't rely on cheap deaths or other frustrating tropes of old games.
Text adventures used to be hard!
Sorry can't play it, makes my eyes go funny. Can you turn that text blur off or down?
Edit: Hmm, after playing a little, the shadow is in more places... Already did too much js and css (and go) today to bother, so leaving it for tomorrow.
[1] Not that home-built is bad. Building your own for fun (and making all the old mistakes) is exactly in the spirit of HN for a side project.
edit: just finished. I laughed at some bits, all in all I enjoyed it. I facepalmed when I realised I needed chmod (which I had to look at jsbeautified app.js to get the hint - I was trying su/sudo!).
EDIT Oh, I'm expected to "cheat." Cute. :)
question Looking at the source, how does the solution to the robot puzzle actually get activated?
EDIT Oh, it's a direct string comparison. Okay.
bug If I try to get the man, I'm told
"You can't see no man here"
bug I can't cut-and-paste the hashed password. That sucks.
bug "disintigrates"
bug I can't cut-and-paste the ascii code. There is no way I am typing all that in by eye.
bugfix If I highlight the code and then right-click before letting go of the mouse I can copy
> bug I can't cut-and-paste the ascii code. There is no way I am typing all that in by eye.
> bugfix If I highlight the code and then right-click before letting go of the mouse I can copy
Selecting the text also makes it available for middle-click paste on Linux/UNIX platforms. You can also hit Ctrl-C before releasing the mouse button. But yes, text selection ought to work normally.
edit:
/SPOILER
literally the moment I clicked "send" on this comment I thought about using the console to execute some javascript... welll.