MY ADVENTURON DEBUT

Quirky Test (QT) is an entry to the 2025 TALJ/Text Adventure Literacy Jam. It is my first game written in Adventuron. I usually write in Inform 7, but here, Adventuron offered some things Inform didn't quite, including colored text and graphics.

QT offers a tutorial (optional) to start, in tune with the jam's requirement. But ...

WAIT! WHERE'S THE TIME TRAVEL?

QT doesn't follow the jam's suggested story-theme of time travel. The only time travel is back to 1998 or so with lovingly hand-rendered MSPaint graphics.

It is intentionally surreal, with a point for each magic phrase you figure out. Plus you can play in a loop if you want and feel smart solving it quicker the next time! That's sort of like time travel, I think.

A TUTORIAL AND MORE

QT's goal is not just to have a tutorial for basic moves and commands you should know to be comfortable with a parser game, but that's important.

Along the way there'll be an NPC who discusses fairness in games and what to expect from a parser game in terms of the information it gives you and what you can reasonably be expected to type in.

(...BUT NO OBLIGATION)

But even though he's bigger than you, he won't corner you! You can just attack the puzzles and ignore everything he has to say.

It's a sort of personal thing for me -- I was just glad to have any games as a kid, even unfair ones, and I felt I didn't deserve to have, well, a set of values discussing whether a game was worthy of my time. (Or, well, time AND money, for the games I didn't pirate.)

QT has 23 rooms and a total of 23 necessary points to score, but it also has a bunch of secret points (17) you can find if you're clever or diligent.

Being clever or diligent includes looking at the source code to reveal that annoying thing you missed, although there are commands that give hints. In colored text, no less!

RETRO GRAPHICS!

Quirky Test has graphics for each room. They change when you solve a puzzle. While no art experts have appraised it, perhaps the graphics will inspire you, too, to believe you can write an illustrated game, if THIS guy is shameless enough to dump graphics like that in his own game.

FOOTNOTES AND ACHIEVEMENTS!

On winning QT, you can replay and look for footnotes about why I made the choices I did, or even some wordplay puzzles that didn't make the cut.

Intrepid adventurers may appreciate the chance to try for achievements. Some require only persistence. Some require attention to detail. Some require blowing detail off completely.

Or, you know, don't try too hard at any one thing, and move on to the other neat games in this jam. They're not meant to be trivial, and life's short. Oh, you can check the GitHub repo out as well for spoilers!

DEDICATED TO IMPROVEMENT!

QT is meant to be a complete game as-is. However, some changes are already planned for a quick post-comp release, and bugs will crop up, whether technical or ease-of-play. If you have a suggestion to improve it, go here and report an issue! I appreciate this, as I know I have my blind spots.

I hope you find QT clever and funny and insightful. I had fun learning Adventuron and putting it together.

OUTSIDE LINKS

This GitHub repo also contains the source code, which may not be perfect Adventuron code, but I think it shows what Adventuron can do. So if someone learns something from it, great!

Of course, be warned there are spoilers in the source code. My walkthroughs intentionally do not cover bonus points, because they're meant to be nontrivial, but you can find how to get them, and the achievements, and the footnotes, there.

Thanks to Garry Francis for administering this jam and Chris Ainsley for past jams and for Adventuron.