Category Archives: video game

2018 MIT Mystery Hunt

In 2017, my MIT Mystery Hunt team, Death and Mayhem, found the Coin first. I wasn’t actually at MIT at the time. I was helping out as best I could from the great state of Iowa.

The horrible fate of each winning team is that they have to design the following year’s Hunt. For me this was a dream come true: I admired the Mystery Hunt from afar for years, and it was really exciting just to be on a competing team when I joined D&M in 2015. Over the course of 2017 I got to help make the MIT Mystery Hunt which feels like a fictional sentence even now.

Then MLK Day Weekend of 2018 appeared, and I went to Boston to help with Hunt operations in whatever way I could. That was the plan, anyway.

I must have caught something on the plane ride, which probably interacted with the incredible stress of the epic undertaking I had involved myself in, and I fell ill. I was out of commission for like 70% of the weekend. WHOOPS

So let’s get back to 2017: I got to contribute a whole bunch of different things to this Mystery Hunt, and I’m very proud of them, and now, four months later for some reason, I’m devoting a blog post to bragging about them.

Continue reading →

The Statue Got Me High: Annotated Source Code

I’ve annotated source text for several of my text adventures, to distribute to a certain tier of my Patreon supporters. One such Patreoneer told me that I should make some of the older annotations available publicly. Now, I’m not one to allow my Patreon supporters to boss me around—I’m an artist, and very passionate about my artistic integrity—but in this case the guy making the suggestion was Simon Carless, and him I do allow to boss me around.

So here is the annotated source code text of Simon’s favorite game, “The Statue Got Me High.” If you haven’t played this game, you should definitely give it a look before you wade into the source. It shouldn’t take more than an hour to play through.

“The Statue Got Me High,” written as part of a tribute to the They Might Be Giants album Apollo 18 in 2012, is I think the third game I ever released. The nuts and bolts of the implementation do not meet the high standards that I hold myself to as an Inform 7 developer in 2017. Some of the code is embarrassing. But if you’re interested in using Inform 7 to create text adventures, this should be a useful example to you—just, please, promise me you won’t learn too much.

Continue reading →

UNCOVERED: Crocodracula!

UPDATE OCTOBER 30: YOU CAN PLAY THIS GAME. But read below so you know what the deal is:

If you’re the right age then you definitely remember Crocodracula, the terrifying soap opera for kids from the early nineties. If you’re too old, or too young, or your parents (wisely???) prevented you from watching, the show was a lot like Land of the Lost, but in a kind of modern gothic horror mode instead of cavemen and dinosaurs. I’ve also heard it described as “Dark Shadows for tweens” but I don’t know how accurate that assessment is.

HOWEVER, even nineties kids don’t necessarily remember that there was at least one Crocodracula computer game, released by Taleframe in 1991. I say “at least one” because the title, “Crocodracula: What Happened to Calvin,” makes it sound like they were at least planning to release other games, possibly based on other episodes/story arcs from the show. It’s hard to tell. Crocodracula information is really hard to come by for some reason.

The point is, I now have a copy of this game.

Continue reading →

A Cool Thing in the Breath of the Wild Soundtrack

Here’s the Reddit thread where this started. The short version is: /u/Takfloyd pointed out that, when you first enter a Divine Beast (and up until you activate one of its terminals), for example Vah Medoh, the music includes Morse code, beeping an SOS.

Then /u/TonesBalones and /u/Dragonaichu point out that, while there’s definitely an SOS in the left channel, the right channel plays different Morse: . . – . – – . .

So what does that mean?

Continue reading →

The Roscovian Palladium

My new text adventure is called THE ROSCOVIAN PALLADIUM and it deals with art, culture, and politics—well, it deals with the fictional politics of talking rats. It’s a rat heist in an art museum! Rats!!!

Development of my text adventures is supported by my PATREON patrons. If you like what I do, you can pledge some amount of money to send my way every time I release a game. Some Patreon folks have it set up so that you pay them every month but I don’t release a game every month so I don’t have it set up that way.

Lots of people pledge just a single American dollar per game, which means they each send me probably less than $5 a year, but none of it goes unappreciated and all of them get to view the secret Patreoneer-only Twitter feed.

At the very least you should go to my Patreon page and watch the little video I did because I am still proud of it.

HALLOWEEN TIME

🍂🐀🌕🎃🐍🚪🕷☠️👁‍🗨⚰

Halloween is my favorite dang thing, and I try to make the most of it. There is not enough October in a year for all the spooky stuff I want to accomplish. But, with a view toward enhancing your Halloween experience, I would like to promote here some of the Weeny things I’ve produced for your enjoyment. Pretty scary, boys and girls!

Continue reading →

The Imitable Process of Ryan Veeder

or, “How to Write the Way I Write, in Inform 7”

Good afternoon. Possibly you would like to learn about how I write my text adventure computer games. There are a lot of angles to this subject, and the one I’d like to focus on here is the stage right after all that horrible “coming up with an idea” and “figuring out the story” stuff—the corpus callosum between design and implementation, getting the world to a state where the player can at least walk around and look at stuff.

I’m going to assume a basic familiarity with the Inform 7 programming environment, but if you have no idea how I7 works, you may be able to glean that basic familiarity from this post. Plus you will get to see my terrible handwriting!!!

Okay, so! First I draw a map.

Continue reading →