Synopsis
Strand Games is working on a sequel to Magnetic Scrolls' acclaimed The Guild of Thieves. It's called, you guessed it, "The Guild of Thieves 2".
It's been 30 years since you proved yourself worthy of The Guild of Thieves.
Over the years, your abilities have only improved, to a tr...
Synopsis
A new Strand game - Superheroes right? Well not exactly.
The Italian Maxman is not your regular superhero. He's not super strong. He can't dodge bullets or leap tall buildings. He's a bit overweight, but nevertheless, he's not one bit less the all action superhero. Saving the world...
DI Lance Picton
Last time we looked at the outline for The Picton Files.
You play as DI Picton in this series of hard hitting detective crime thrillers. Although set in the modern world, the mysteries are nonetheless just as cunning as a Sherlock Holmes case.
Concept
The Picton Files are a series of contemporary crime detective thrillers developed by Strand Games. The games are episodic and feature two lead characters: Detective Inspector Lance Picton and his assistant Kit. You are DI Picton and must solve the case with Kit's help. Gameplay inv...
Welcome to part three of the "Roger the Pirate" series, detailing the Strand Games design and build process. We'll be designing the game, along with the source code and illustrations.
If you haven't already read:
Welcome to the second part of a new blog series detailing the Strand Games design and build process. We'll be building an actual game, along with design, source code and illustrations.
If you haven't read part 1, go here.
This is the first part of a new blog series detailing the Strand Games design and build process. We'll be building an actual game, along with design, source code, graphics and sound.
Lost BBC Micro and TRS-80 Game, Temple of Disrondu 1982, discovered!
A fragment of Interactive Fiction history was recovered today, when a chain of events led to the rediscovery of a "lost" adventure game; Temple of Disrondu, published by Rob Steggles in 1982.
This is Part 2 of a series of articles on Strand Games' IF authoring technology called Strand. Strand is a domain specific IF language and runtime.
Last time, we saw how Terms and Flow can generate random stories. Now we'll see how the same mechanism builds choices.
This is Part 1 of a series of articles on Strand Games' IF authoring technology called Strand. Strand is a domain specific IF language and runtime.
With it, you can easily make parser IF, choice IF and anything in between with no programming. Deploy to mobile, desktop or the web with a GUI supporting pictures, animation and sound.
This week we've released desktop versions of The Pawn Remastered on Itch.io. Versions are available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Android and iOS are soon to follow.
As part of our history project, things are well underway on the restoration of Jinxter by Magnetic Scrolls. We're calling this one, "Jinxter Revived".
What is KL?
KL stands for "knowledge language", and is a new domain specific programming language for interactive fiction developed at Strand.
Strand Games is about history, technology and games. Up until now, our efforts have focused mostly on IF history, but this is the first of a series of blogs revealing new IF technology being developed at Strand.
The architecture is to separate the various parts of the overall problem into components. For example, to separate the GUI from the IF game engine. These components we refer to as the front-end and the back-end.
To connect these two components we've developed a technology called "IFI", the Interactive fiction Interface.
New this week, item icons have been added to The Guild of Thieves Restored. These appear on the item sidebar.
Here are some scans of original reviews of The Guild of Thieves from 1987.
A while back we promised inverted colours; that's light text on a dark background, as opposed to the (now usual) dark text on a light background. Of course, the original games were all played in this light on dark mode, so it's pretty cool - even if you don't have a black iPhone to go with it.
The Magnetic Scrolls interactive fiction of the 1980's had pictures. This was a new thing! Interactive fiction - or text adventures back then did not (generally) have pictures; and those that did were usually quite poor.
The idea was that a picture worked like an illustration in a book, and would...
If you've written a game in ChoiceScript, you can now run it under Brahman and turn it into a deployable product with a graphic UI for both desktops and mobile.
The Guild of Thieves (1987) was the second game published by Magnetic Scrolls. It was very popular and did a lot of things right.
The Guild has a simple overall game mechanic and was what Scrolls called a "collect the treasures game". Although this phrase somewhat oversimplifies the story, there are some important aspects to this approach that significantly contribute to overall popularity;
Here we have possibly the only surviving backup tape of the source code to 30 year old historical game data being put into an oven and baked!
Have we gone raving mad? Have we totally lost it? What is this insanity?
The dish is: Baked tapes! Done nicely in your normal kitchen oven. Cook at 45C for 8 hours, take them out, wait to cool then server them (in your server, of course) to hopefully make a good source.
No, we're not quite totally crazy (yet). Amazing as it seems, this is the way to restore certain old tape backups. I kid you not.
Read on, for the madness...
This week we've released desktop versions of The Pawn Remastered on Itch.io. Versions are available for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Following on from the first attempt to recover data from 30 year old Magnetic Scrolls TK50 backup tapes, it's been a roller-coaster ride, so I thought I'd post an update;
Rob Jarratt has been doing an absolutely amazing job at persuading these old tapes to read again - and it's not easy. The picture above shows his TK50Z tape drive dismantled.
Following on from the previous hoard of tapes recovered, here's another trove of interesting items;
I thought I would cover a high-level overview of the Brahman system.
Brahman is a collection of technologies that together make a game system. Here, we're covering just the runtime and not the authoring tools.
Is that him, in the picture? No no, surely this is just your friendly, local neighbourhood inflatable dinosaur juggler!
No, fred23 was a program not a person. To understand what fred23 was, it's is necessary to explain a bit about the Magnetic Scrolls' world model.
This is Rob Jarratts' DECstation 2100 with a TZ85 tape drive. He's been trying really hard to restore data from our old TK50 backup tapes made by our DEC MicroVAX back in 1988.
The first tape we tried was, unfortunately, not readable. This might be for any number of reasons. Old tapes tend to...
The Android version is in Beta, and we're working on the desktop versions of The Pawn by Magnetic Scrolls. There will be versions for Mac OSX, Windows and Linux.
Stefan sent me these pictures of the game running under various Linuxes. We test stuff you know!
Some days ago, Hugh managed to recover a bunch of files from a ZIP disk. Among the files there was this one special archive file: VAX.ARC. So close, yet so far.
Despite all the efforts Hugh had taken to track down, compile and run the ARC 5.21p tool, the file has blatantly withstood all extracti...