Cornquest is now available on gemini.
gemini://tilde.town/~dozens/cornquest
Conquest is a little branching path, choose your own adventure, interactive fiction fantasy adventure story. In it, you get to play a child hero trying to save their village. Your quest takes you beyond the safety of your corn obsessed village, deep into the spooky woods, and below and above the earth. It is a little absurd, a little surreal, and---I hope---a lot of fun!
I started writing Cornquest in 2022 with the intention of submitting it for publication in tilde.town zine, issue 6. I finished it in 2023 just in time to submit it to issue 7 after reducing its scope and re-focusing on writing.
The entire game is a single recutils database, each record containing the body text, and links to other records.
Here's what a record looks like:
id: 0
name: beginning
text: You wake up in the comfort of your own bed, in your own room. You
+ open your eyes to see the golden sunlight come streaming in through your
+ window. Golden like ears of corn. You suddenly remember what day it is. It
+ is the day of the Harvest Festival! You throw back your favorite corn print
+ bed covers and leap out of bed. You've been looking forward to this day all
+ year, and you already know exactly what you're going to wear. If you wear a
+ pretty corn dress, goto {{corndress}}. If you wear rugged corn bib
+ overalls, goto to {{cornoveralls}}.
A little scripting shuffles the records (it's no fun to read a CYOA story unless the passages require lots of flipping back and forth!), builds the links, and then creates the groff source for building the PDF. As a visual aide, the rec source is also compiled into graphviz so I can take a look at the story as a graph. This is nice so I can see dead ends and orphans, and visualize the story branching.
I made a little video demonstrating some of the tooling I built to support writing the game. You can watch it on peertube!
https://tube.tchncs.de/w/hsiLFG8WqA7XxNr4tcW3LE
I later discovered that twine's internal internal syntax, twee, is dead simple, so I did a quick rec to twee export, and built an html version of the game with twine that can be played on the web.
https://tilde.town/~dozens/cornquest.html
The whole kit and caboodle is up on https://git.tilde.town for your perusal
https://git.tilde.town/dozens/cornquest
And this weekend, I decided that a little simple interactive fiction would be really fun to play over gemini. So I did a quick gemtext export. This was my first time looking at the story in a little over a year. And I was right, it is really fun to play on gemini! (I played on the Elaho browser on iOS.) But I also found a few typos and couple of odd phrasings. So I went through and tweaked some wording here and there.
So this isn't just Cornquest. This is Cornquest: Gemini Edition. You can't get this version anywhere else but on port 1965!
:wq
Thoughts? Comments? Let me know at dozens@tilde.team
Filed under:
title: Cornquest: An interactive fiction game for gemini author: dozens <dozens@tilde.team> url: gemini://tilde.town/~dozens/gemlog/24.gmi created: Sun, 25 Aug 2024 15:19:02 -0600 updated: 2024-08-25T17:41:44-06:00 tags: gemini game writing groff recutils graphviz
