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Untitled Heist Game

This is a project to write a game in the style of Infocom's "interactive fiction" software of the 1980s, for use in computer security courses.

It is easy to set up a laboratory network for students to practise system intrusion techniques, and organise "red team" vs. "blue team" competitions. It's far more difficult to create any sort of lab practical for physical security situations.

Since we can't quickly spin up an example office building to break into, the next best thing is an old-fashioned "text adventure".

Build

This repository is based on an example project template, but has been expanded to build the Parchment interpreter in a style that mimics late-1980s serial terminals from the Digital Equipment Corporation.

The instructions for building are below, but instead of installing something like frotz, you can visit the index.html after a successful build to play in your browser.

Upstream README follows:

This repo contains three files:

  1. A Makefile that needs only:
  2. minimal.inf from the PunyInform distribution
  3. A minimal.test file that will test the correctness of the resulting minimal.z5 game

How do I use this?

Just type:

make

If you have all the dependencies satisfied, you should eventually have a minimal.out file that just lists the successful test suites.

So what do I do next?

First of all, you could install frotz or some other Z-machine interpreter, and play the minimal.z5 game with it.

But you probably want to write your own game. I recommend making a mynewgame.test file (named after your cool game idea) and entering a transcript of how you'd imagine your game could be played successfully (at least as far as you've planned it). Then make a mynewgame.inf (also named to match the test file) and keep coding until the tests all pass!

A whole transcript?

Well no need for that exactly. Just enter the commands and use the ! and / features listed in the comments of minimal.test to set conditions based on substring matches and negative matches.

There's a new version of inform6 or PunyInform out!

You can refresh the sources by running make dep. The compiler should re-build (if needed) the next time you run make, before compiling your game.

This builds a z5 game, but I want z3!

We build z5 because that is what the zvm interpreter implements, and we use that for our test suite. You may find yourself wanting to craft a custom compile command to optimise for abbreviations and other command-line switches, but if you want to quickly churn out a .z3 version to save around a kilobyte or more, just run:

make mynewgame.z3

Note that z3 format has limitations on (among other things) the number of objects and synonyms for a given object. You may notice compiler warnings that some name words are being dropped, etc.

It broke!

  • Are you running this from a POSIX shell such as busybox sh, dash, bash, or zsh? This won't work on DOS/PowerShell systems to our knowledge.
  • Is your game compatible with the latest version of PunyInform?