Start of a transcript of Calliope An Interactive Obtrusion by J McIntosh (first-time players should type 'about'.) Release 1 / Serial number 991001 / Inform v6.15 Library 6/7 Standard interpreter 1.0 (6F) / Library serial number 970918 >restart Are you sure you want to restart? y You've been hacking at this silly game for weeks, and now that the pressure's on, with the competition deadline only a few days away, you figured an all- nighter would be just the thing. But as the bugs pile up, and the clock ticks on, the notion of completion looks more and more distant... Calliope An Interactive Obtrusion by J McIntosh (first-time players should type 'about'.) Release 1 / Serial number 991001 / Inform v6.15 Library 6/7 Living Room (on the seedy office chair) You amuse yourself to think of this as your living room. Technically, if you have to demarcate it from the rest of your apartment, it is that-which-is-not- the-bathroom-or-kitchen. And, really, especially lately, you tend only to populate this corner of it, nested inside the crook of your computer desk, surrounded by all the gear that lies on and under it. You can see a large computer desk (on which are a paperback mythology reference, a coffee mug, a mutated Macintosh and an Inform Designer's Manual), a halogen floor lamp (providing light) and a television set (providing light) here. >about My prime goal in writing Calliope was to get comfortable with the Inform programming language, and I believe I succeeded that much. Originally, I meant to accomplish this merely by painting a (somewhat self-deprecatory) autobiographical portrait of myself hacking confusedly away at a going-nowhere Inform program, making a silly little diorama which, once complete, I might have shown a couple of friends before setting it aside and probably forgetting about it, but enough ideas for expanding this into a dippy little quote-unquote 'interactive' tribute to text adventure programming in general fell into my head to move me to expand this bloated exercise from pastiche to short story. I then submitted the whole mess to the 1999 IF Comp, partly to make good on my never- canceled entrance request from the beginning of this year (When I had a vague idea about a game I wanted to make, which I then let lie fallow for some months, poked at a little, and then abandoned), but mostly for the same reason most people probably have when they enter the Boston Marathon. It's a fun lark! While I can't expect this little trifle to score very well in the competition, I hope that you get a smile or two from it anyway. I had enough fun writing it, learning as I went, to want to dig immediately into making a 'real' text adventure game, so, as far as I'm concerned, it's a smashing success. Special thanks to betatesters Leah Bonistalli, Jordan 'Greywolf' Peacock, Jeff Pitrman, and Andy Turner. You may send comments and criticism to me at jmac@jmac.org. --Jason McIntosh >i You are carrying nothing. >x mac You have rewarded this mostly-beige (for, some months ago, you intentionally spattered a parti-color pattern of India ink across its case while in an artsy mood) little pizza box's years of service with a number of upgrades its manufacturer did not intend. Of course, none of this helps you out any now, as it doesn't take much processing power to generate the half-baked 'game' facing you presently. At least you can compile quickly. The mutated Macintosh is currently switched on. >x screen This is a fairly typical 15-inch color monitor, evidencing its age of a few years through its slight blurriness. However, it's just fine for programming, which is what you're to doing now. Or, at least, the several windowsful of indented text sprawled across several windows would suggest this to an onlooker. After hours of frustration, you might call it something else. The monitor is currently switched on. Meanwhile, the TV continues its pleasant drone of background noise... "I tell ya Marv, I've had it up to here with those nosy neighbors of ours. I swear I'm gonna teach them a lesson!" >read screen This is a fairly typical 15-inch color monitor, evidencing its age of a few years through its slight blurriness. However, it's just fine for programming, which is what you're to doing now. Or, at least, the several windowsful of indented text sprawled across several windows would suggest this to an onlooker. After hours of frustration, you might call it something else. The monitor is currently switched on. >type on computer ---------------------------------------- [The screen fills with garbage. Joy.] ---------------------------------------- >er That's not a verb I recognise. >l Living Room (on the seedy office chair) You amuse yourself to think of this as your living room. Technically, if you have to demarcate it from the rest of your apartment, it is that-which-is-not- the-bathroom-or-kitchen. And, really, especially lately, you tend only to populate this corner of it, nested inside the crook of your computer desk, surrounded by all the gear that lies on and under it. You can see a large computer desk (on which are a paperback mythology reference, a coffee mug, a mutated Macintosh and an Inform Designer's Manual), a halogen floor lamp (providing light) and a television set (providing light) here. You seem to have passed over the point of diminishing returns on your caffeine consumption some time ago, as you're starting to feel the combined effects of the late hour and the fact you've been hacking at this thing for god knows how many hours, despite the amount of coffee you've been drinking. "Oh yeah, smartypants? Whattayagonna do, sic the Mob on them?" (laughter) >turn off telly You switch the television set off. >x mug Your favorite coffee mug, last filled with your brew of choice some hours ago. A little bit of it remains within. >sip brew You can't see any such thing. >x brew You can't see any such thing. >drink What do you want to drink? >mug You find yourself taking a healthy sip of cold coffee, but brave it out, deciding it a better thing to swallow the scummy stuff than spit-take all over your computer. >x mythology reference You dug this fat and well-worn little paperback from your boxes of high school textbooks to serve as reference for the game, but between your procrastination and your proclivity towards low-level hacking instead of design, you probably haven't used it that much. >read it You dug this fat and well-worn little paperback from your boxes of high school textbooks to serve as reference for the game, but between your procrastination and your proclivity towards low-level hacking instead of design, you probably haven't used it that much. >x dm You can't see any such thing. >x manual A few months ago, when you were young and foolish, you printed out a copy of the entirety of this, the bible of programming IF games in your chosen language, in a flyspeck-sized font, eight pages to a sheet, and had one edge gummed to make a skinny book. Little did you know then how much of a disservice to your future self this economical thinking would represent, as your weariness effectively denies your eyes the level of focus necessary to decipher the tiny print. >l Living Room (on the seedy office chair) You amuse yourself to think of this as your living room. Technically, if you have to demarcate it from the rest of your apartment, it is that-which-is-not- the-bathroom-or-kitchen. And, really, especially lately, you tend only to populate this corner of it, nested inside the crook of your computer desk, surrounded by all the gear that lies on and under it. You can see a large computer desk (on which are a paperback mythology reference, a coffee mug, a mutated Macintosh and an Inform Designer's Manual), a halogen floor lamp (providing light) and a television set here. >x lamp This six-foot-tall lamp set in the room's extreme corner works by shining directly upwards from the halogen bulbs nestled in its opaque crown, letting its light reflect radially from the ceiling, and normally acts as the apartment's sole light source at night, since its dim, sharply-angled rays let every little thing cast shadows, making the whole environment more... dramatic. The halogen floor lamp is currently switched on. >turn off lamp You switch the halogen floor lamp off. >l Living Room (on the seedy office chair) You amuse yourself to think of this as your living room. Technically, if you have to demarcate it from the rest of your apartment, it is that-which-is-not- the-bathroom-or-kitchen. And, really, especially lately, you tend only to populate this corner of it, nested inside the crook of your computer desk, surrounded by all the gear that lies on and under it. You can see a large computer desk (on which are a paperback mythology reference, a coffee mug, a mutated Macintosh and an Inform Designer's Manual), a halogen floor lamp and a television set here. >write game That's not a verb I recognise. >program What do you want to program? >game And abandon what you've done so far? Despairingly buggy as it is, you haven't come up with any better ideas for a contest entry, and even if you had, it's far too late to start anything fresh. You seem to have passed over the point of diminishing returns on your caffeine consumption some time ago, as you're starting to feel the combined effects of the late hour and the fact you've been hacking at this thing for god knows how many hours, despite the amount of coffee you've been drinking. >sleep[ That's not a verb I recognise. >sleep Tempting, very tempting... Huh? An unexpected flickering-by of text on the game window catches your attention, preventing the slow, inexorable progress toward the keyboard your head was apparently making. You blink away the blurriness of Sleep, thwarted once again, and squint at what just appeared... ---------------------------------------- Calliope strolls into the room. >_ ---------------------------------------- 'Calliope'? The fact that the game did something in between turns is one thing -- after all, it's been done before, and you honestly wouldn't be half-surprised if your low-level mucking about has allowed for such behavior to happen by complete accident -- but you definitely have no recollection of any 'Calliope' living in your program (though the name does ring a bell), and no amount of the most obfuscated code is capable of writing its own NPCs! >x calliope You can't see any such thing. >x screen This is a fairly typical 15-inch color monitor, evidencing its age of a few years through its slight blurriness. However, it's just fine for programming, which is what you're to doing now. Or, at least, the several windowsful of indented text sprawled across several windows would suggest this to an onlooker. After hours of frustration, you might call it something else. The monitor is currently switched on. The strange, apparently untriggered output continues... ---------------------------------------- "Gentle Artist!" Her voice seems strangely familiar, yet... distant, hard to place. >_ ---------------------------------------- >z Time passes. The strange, apparently untriggered output continues... ---------------------------------------- "No amount of honeyed words can soothe the bitterness borne of frustration. As the Levinskys have foiled our plans in the past time and again, so are poets left nothing but their own teeth to gnash when their ideas abandon them, and they can do nothing but burn over trifles, stirring cold, decayed ideas that have lost their spark." >_ ---------------------------------------- >z Time passes. The strange, apparently untriggered output continues... ---------------------------------------- "Gentle artist! The World is great, far more vast than thy dreams, and always able to replenish even the most embittered mind with new life and fire." >_ ---------------------------------------- >z Time passes. The strange, apparently untriggered output continues... ---------------------------------------- "As the swift hammer of justice shall soon descend upon those nosy neighbors of ours, So will Inspiration descend upon you, aloft on irridescent wings. If you will but let it." >_ ---------------------------------------- >z Time passes. One more line appears on-screen: "Smiling, Calliope draws forth her scrolls, while taking a step towards you..." From the shadows behind you: a footfall. You perform one of those little full-body twitches that so often wakes you, usually when you've been asleep for only a little while. Oh no... Something uncomfortable encourages you to lift your head off the desk, disturbing the mountains of paper refuse a bit. Oh, look at that: you found the TV's remote by falling asleep on it. On the power button, more specifically, since the set's back on. Well, there you have it! You can't say you've had a completely unproductive evening, now, can you? Sheesh... On the TV, the canned laughter approves of some quip from one of the scheming apartment dwellers. >change channel You'll have to specify a direction, either up or down. >change channel up The set skips past several channels, stopping on the first one it's programmed not to ignore. At the moment, the screen is displaying some shlocky 1950s horror flick. >x screen This is a fairly typical 15-inch color monitor, evidencing its age of a few years through its slight blurriness. However, it's just fine for programming, which is what you're to doing now. Or, at least, the several windowsful of indented text sprawled across several windows would suggest this to an onlooker. After hours of frustration, you might call it something else. The monitor is currently switched on. >watch telly Who can say how long you've had this 12-inch set. It's always been by your side, helping to provide just the right level of background informational whitenoise to ease the process of hacking. Unfortunately, despite the fact you have cable, you can receive only a few channels, since you programmed the thing to skip over all but a few favorites, and you've long since lost the manual to the kipplefields of your apartment. Sadly, the same could be said for its remote control, which has a habit of coming and going. You can use the volume and channel controls on the set itself for now, though. At the moment, the screen is displaying some shlocky 1950s horror flick. The television set is currently switched on. A housefly buzzes in from the room behind you, and commences a holding pattern in the airspace immediately surrounding your head. Ugh. >swat fly The fly's God-given evasive abilities render your clumsy bare-handed flailing utterly ineffective. The housefly lands on the wall and commences to explore its surface. On the TV, the scientist postulates something dramatically. >stand You get off the seedy office chair. Living Room You can see a buzzing housefly, a large computer desk (on which are a remote control, a paperback mythology reference, a coffee mug, a mutated Macintosh and an Inform Designer's Manual), a seedy office chair, a halogen floor lamp and a television set here. The housefly continues to crawl around erratically on the wall. >x chair Like your desk, your chair has also been through a lot, but, being a good, soft, susceptible chair, displays quite a bit more injury for it. Both arms have much of their rubber coating picked away, exposing the foam within, the backrest wobbles constantly and creakily, and you sometimes suspect the seat lies off the horizontal plane by a degree or two, but when you've got your mind on computer- related issues -- which is to say, whenever you sit in this chair -- you usually can't be troubled to notice. The housefly decides to take wing, and it resumes its painfully distracting course around the room, and your head. >x bed Straining your willpower, you manage to avert your eyes from the bed that you know lies only a few steps behind you, in the shadows. In your condition, you know that once it has you under its spell, there's no turning back. The housefly continues its loud, annoying flight. >lie on bed Aw, screw it. Nothing's going right with this thing. Even nature is against you. Maybe... maybe you can finish it in the morning, if you get up early enough... yeah... *** There's always next year *** Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game or QUIT? > undo Living Room [Previous turn undone.] >