Spacestation Readme =================== space_st.z5 is based on the example transcript that came with Infocom's Planetfall Interactive Text Adventure. This is listed in space_st.wlk, don't look at it until you've completed the game. I tried to to make the game as close to the transcript as possible, but couldn't duplicate it exactly because Inform gives different responses, and there were a few errors in the original transcript, plus extra features I added to make the game more playable. I had to invent responses for things you try that are not given in the transcript. I would say it is about 85% accurate. There are new rooms including hall_k, with rooms fore and aft of it, and a room below hall_n. There are only five problems to solve at the moment, since I didn't have time to code and test any more. I would like to thank all the playtesters for spotting a lot of spelling mistakes and errors, and providing new interesting responses for the game. I would have liked the game to be a lot more complex but ran out of time, hopefully I will be able to write an improved version for next year. I don't think I've done a bad job, as I knew virtually nothing about Inform until about 2 months ago, I had been writing this game in Pascal but it became to complicated, especially as it wasn't object orientated. The project originally began as an assignment at Polytechnic, written in Modula-2 (much like Pascal), all I managed to do then was implement the map, and status line. It did help through as many of the concepts were familiar, some things can only be done one way, and I just reinvented them. There must be thousands of people who have tried writing adventure games. I seem to recall a quote from someone at Infocom, "at one time everyone and his granny was writing text adventure parsers", my advice, forget it, it's too complicated for one person, use Inform or one of the other languages. They have a steep learning curve, but once learnt can do just about anything, with a bit of hacking. Then get some play testers to find bugs, and give you some new ideas. Simple! I hope this game encourages other writers to write new science fiction interactive fiction games, as there don't seem to be many about. I actually find text adventures more fun than graphic adventures, maybe that's because they were the only complex games about when I was younger. But graphic adventures are very annoying, if you don't point the arrow in exactly the right place it doesn't work. I made the problems fairly simple because if they're too complicated you just have to look up the answer, and once you've looked up one answer you tend to look them all up. It's a lot more fun solving the whole game yourself, Planetfall's the only game I ever solved without help. The internet has spoiled adventure games as you can always find a site with clues to any game now.