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self.__VINEXT_RSC_CHUNKS__=self.__VINEXT_RSC_CHUNKS__||[];self.__VINEXT_RSC_CHUNKS__.push("2:I[\"aadde9aaef29\",[],\"default\",1]\n3:I[\"6e873226e03b\",[],\"Children\",1]\n5:I[\"bc2946a341c8\",[],\"LayoutSegmentProvider\",1]\n6:I[\"6e873226e03b\",[],\"Slot\",1]\n7:I[\"3506b3d116f7\",[],\"ErrorBoundary\",1]\n8:I[\"a9bbde40cf2d\",[],\"default\",1]\n9:I[\"3506b3d116f7\",[],\"NotFoundBoundary\",1]\na:\"$Sreact.suspense\"\n:HL[\"/assets/index-BLEkI_5r.css\",\"style\"]\n")"_meta_ka9gd_33">140 points by PLenz 1 days ago | 36 comments
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On the one hand, you could encode the hallway itself or the road curve or the passageway as their own weird segments in the grid. But then maybe you bog the player down in a lot of liminal spaces that don't really add much to the game. On the other hand, you could ask the player to bring or build their own map and pay attention to descriptive text like "to the north is a passage that seems to bend to the east" or far more subtle variations of such.
Zork and many other IF games were built on the premise that people would map things and getting lost or confused by grid breaks was part of the fun. (Going back to, as neighboring comments point out, the original Adventure which was modeling caves and caves have always had strange three-dimensional twistiness that doesn't fit a square grid. Part of the fun was discovering that disconnect between the game mechanics using square grid compass terminology and the digraph of the game spaces being more confusing than that.)
Newer games also tend to follow some quality of life rules in their design, things like avoiding arbitrary deaths and avoiding situations where the player cannot progress because they missed something earlier in the game.
Anything Non-Zork. Even Adventure from Don Woods was half-consistent in some places. But having an "odd" geometry matched perfectly the environment of a cave.
Instead imagine that "GO EAST" takes you onto a winding road.
The road arcs southward and to go back you'd have to "GO NORTH".
Further... some travels in Zork even drop you through a hole (though I forget if it tells you so).
So going East might put you in the basement and there's no way to climb back up.
Also https://sharpee.net/
That must be a comment, right?
In that case: "The critter [one of]slouches[or]slithers[or]shambles[or]lurches[at random] away.";
[one of] [or] [at random] are also comments?
Arguably, the right answer now is to document everything that matters to you about the adventure, and tell an LLM to run it.
It would write the book ahead of you, kind of like how railroads could send trains with supplies out to the track as it was built.
It also allows you to deviate from the novel. This is a romance novel. I had the main character choose someone else and it showed an alternate version of the novel. After the main threat of the story was dispatched things settled into weeks of routine living where I added another person into my routine. I played to see if another event would show up but after 3 in game weeks I decided to stop. This was a test and I needed to improve the game. I can see this becoming addictive to some people because they will be living in the story and having a life there and making friends and finding partners.
This type of game is still uncharted territory. Does one end the game or let the player play indefinitely? Is it more fun to have the player do the daily life things or skip those or give them a choice?
https://jxself.org/git/
[1]: https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2025/11/20/preserving-...
I remember building my own mini-6502 debugger of my own for an assignment I was having difficulty debugging on the breadboarded hardware in our lab (and also to save me from having to spend all of my waking hours in that lab). I want to say it was in something stupid like PHP at the time, but it was just a quick and dirty hacked together thing I did in like an hour during a lecture for a different class.
I've seen some really cool projects on HN of people building visual/visible 6502 boards. LEDs have gotten so cheap and the 6502 is so easy to replicate in FPGA and other hardware spaces that you can build real neat 6502 computers. Which I think the original homebrew computer club hackers would still respect all these years later. (The 6502 fueled the original home computer revolution and was in so many machines, from the Apple II to the Commodore 64 to the NES and more. It was such a key workhorse chip.) I'm still glad I had a lab course on the 6502 in my college education. (The follow up one with the Motorola 68k was maybe less successful, and mostly taught us why the 68k is the last real breadboardable CPU in so many ways including the way that it frequently burned through breadboards and made most debugging a hardware issue.)