Adventure Games with Revolution?

[Richard Gaskin]

Roger Kenyon wrote:
 > On 12/23/04 7:11 PM, "Richard Gaskin" <ambassador at fourthworld.com> wrote:
 >
 >>rivertext.com

 > Richard:
 >
 > Could you tell me more about the text adventure game within
 > "If Monks Had Macs". I went to the site, but it is, well,
 > less than lucid.

Oh, it's quie lucid.  But "If Monks Had Macs" is hard to pin down.

Brian's description of it at the rivertext.com site is a pretty good 
one, given the size and diversity of the collection of goodies on the CD.

As the author of the book "Secrets of Successful Multimedia Design" put it:

   "...resists categorization...acheived 'acknowledged masterpiece'
    status without anyone being able to hand a label on it."

I tried to sum it up in the pages at my own site for Sophie, the free 
e-book reader we jointly developed which is also included in the "Monks" 
package:

    Sophie is only one part of the collection of literary machines,
    interative art and provacative ideas found in If Monks Had Macs,
    a multimedia CD-ROM product for Mac and Windows.
    <http://www.fourthworld.com/products/sophie/monks.html>

RunRev and Rivertext recently issues a joint release with a demo that 
should be available somewhere -- in RevOnline?

 > I am mainly interested in point-and-click adventure games (such as
 > Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, or Sam & Max), but text adventure
 > with Revolution is an interesting idea. It is bound to be easier to
 > use than Inform or TADS.

Indeed it is.  Rev's text handling is both efficient and easy to do.  To 
paraphrase Meis van der Rohe, God is in chunk expressions. ;)

The text adventure in "Monks" is a fun one:  in "Meat and Conversation" 
you take on the role of a travelling monk, with the goal of avoiding 
temptations.

There's also a solitaire game, Killing Time, nicely done with a set of 
gorgeously-drawn cards, with coding done by Jacque Gay (who's popular 
Blocker and Klondike stacks she made in Rev have kept me quite busy for 
embarassingly long stretches).

But there's a lot more there:  Jeanne DeVoto contributed some code to 
Brian's exploration of Bruegel's "Tower of Babel" painting, I 
collaborated with him on a personal journal application that's included, 
and all this and more is accessed from a bookshelf in a nicely rendered 
monastary cloister, complete with animated fountain and monk chants. :)

My personal favorite in "Monks" is the Thinkertoy, a wonderfully novel 
way to nagivate among the writings of Emerson and others on slavery 
(there's a screen shot  of it near the bottom-left of this page: 
<http://www.rivertext.com/monks3.html>).

With all that going on it's definitely hard to describe in a quick 
sound-byte. :)


But as for graphical adventure games, I know there must be more out 
there.  As you know Myst was built with HyperCard and The Castle was 
built a while ago with SuperCard:

Making of: <http://www.blueline-studios.com/casBeh.html>
Review: <http://fourfatchicks.com/Reviews/Castle/Castle.shtml>
Interview: 
<http://fourfatchicks.com/Rants/Interviews/Dan_Kueng/Dan_Kueng_Interview.shtml>

But of these graphical point-and-clicks I must say I've had a great time 
with Alida (alidagame.com).

One of the difficulties with finding point-and-click adventure games is 
that even though you and I love them the market is fixated on real-time 
3D, which requires a specialized engine and usually a lot of resources 
to put together.

But there's always room for more -- dive in and build one and I'll play it.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  __________________________________________________
  Rev tools and more: http://www.fourthworld.com/rev