On Reflection A FREEWARE text-adventure for the 128k Spectrum By Lee Tonks (C)2007, Cheese Freak Software "On Reflection" has been my pet project for the last two years or so. My initial idea was to try to create a Spectrum adventure which was a bit more like modern 'interactive fiction', and also something which didn't fit into the usual adventure stereotype of 'slightly comedy dungeons and dragons'. As a result, I decided to aim for a more real-world setting (with a science-fiction bent to spice things up), and to go for a smallish map and a seriously text-heavy approach to get around the age-old "You are in a room, the door is North" padded-out rubbish that blights so many of our old favourites. And it took AGES. And ages. Finally it has reached a stage where I figure I'd better release it or it'll never actually make it out. I apologise in advance for any bits I forgot to finish. So.... it's a 128-only, text-only, PAWed mild sci-fi thing (with naught a goblin or a wizard in sight) pitched at the average/bi/curious adventure player who likes to enjoy his adventures rather than fight them. That means it understands a small(ish) vocabulary (which you can browse if you're not sure which word to use), has a map which makes sense, doesn't feature "mazes", has very few 'death' situations (and no unavoidable ones), and is populated with logical puzzles which are perfectly possible to figure out with the information given (i.e. at no point will you be required to fashion a door key out of a fish). Type HELP once you get the game started for an overview. It should work fine on any flavour 128 or emulator, and it also appears to work on the various Russian Speccy clones like the Pentagon. I've not tried it on a real Spectrum, but I've no reason to believe it won't work on that too. The game is being released as FREEWARE. Feel free to do as you wish with it, providing that 'as you wish' doesn't make you any money. If you want to upload it to your web site or write a review or something then that's fine, although I would appreciate it if you could send me a private message via the World of Spectrum forums (my user name is "Lee Tonks", if you hadn't guessed already) so that I can go and have a look. Like I said before, this is my first adventure in years, my first ever PAWed adventure, and hopefully the first adventure I've produced which doesn't suck. Hopefully. Look, go gentle on me, alright? Please! Oh yeah - and have fun. A full solution has been submitted to the Tipshop in case you get stuck. :-) CREDITS ------- * Gilsoft for PAW * Leszek Chmielewski for BMP2Scr, which I used for the loading screen * The ZX Spin guys whose emulator I used throughout development * The various developers of UNPAWS, which helped me to spell/grammar-check the whole script LINKS ----- HOME: http://uk.geocities.com/leetonks/Speccy/onreflection.html World of Spectrum: http://www.worldofspectrum.org World of Spectrum forums: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/ (my user name is Lee Tonks) The Tipshop: http://www.the-tipshop.co.uk/ REVISION HISTORY ---------------- 1.0 (06/12/07) - First (and hopefully final) release! Whoo! KNOWN ISSUES ------------ Occasionally, the PAW text formatter will dump a punctuation mark on a new line when it follows a colour change. It looks a bit ugly but doesn't break the game. I couldn't manage to figure out a way to stop it from doing that, and didn't want to remove my colours. I do so like my colours. If anyone knows a way around this then I'd be happy to hear from you.