Delvenor Beacon, a Guildhall games applet

Oh how this game has changed. After playing Adventure on a PDP-10, and playing Zork on a PDP-11, I was inspired to try to write my own text adventure in UCSD Pascal. It was loosely called Wizard and had a lot of things working. I only completed about two zones of the eight planned. Then came graduation, and a purchase of an Apple /// (so I could keep working on all my UCSD Pascal apps), and Wizard moved along a bit more. There were plenty of other things to work on for about another 30 years, but finally in 2016 or so I dusted it off, got the text console working, and started adding to it again.

Somewhere along the line the plot started getting more intricate, and one day I realized it had grown to a point where it dovetailed with all the other stories I was working on for the Fells Guild universe. I played with that idea some, and realized yes, it fit quite well. So the original two zones got overlaid with a more intense purpose, and I liked the result. But by implication, there's a book that can be written about this whole adventure. There's always another story.

Here's a peek at the running applet. The basic scenario is a company called Ephemeral Journeys offers a service that lets you make a connection to the mind of a young human male who will live many centuries after the 21st, and on a different planet from Earth. This connection, you are told, represents a possible future, not a real future, so if you mess up Jeremy's life it doesn't really count. At least that's what they tell you. And Jeremy desperately needs your help, for a sequence of very bad things has befallen him. He's all alone and terrified. And then he discovers you in his thoughts.

The scene below occurs after a bunch of introduction and represents the first time the user gets to interact with the text console. Of course I had alot of fun with that text console. It's the same one used by my shell applet Terminus and supports embedding colored text, images, and graphs (vector drawings) in the console stream.

Next Steps

At this point the game doesn't really have an audience, but the story certainly could. So from time to time I'll add locations, puzzles, events, and plenty of descriptions. We'll see where it goes.