about the game
You play as a space
explorer
named Alex. Alex and his twin brother, Andy,
are aboard the Annex (short for Andy & Alex), an exploration and transport starship
vessel that was built in the year
2159. Alex and Andy
travel together, exploring uncharted new worlds in the furthest depths of outer space.
The
rest of the story is up to you!
You will decide which paths the story takes and how to overcome the various obstacles and
challenges
that you will most definitely face throughout your explorations.
Intelligent, Responsive Gameplay
Ultimately, your choices will influence every aspect of your adventure; character development, the people and/or creatures you may encounter on your journey, and how you choose to take on your next adventure...
BETA Testhow to play
(Once complete) simply send a text message to 800-555-5555 , then follow the instructions in the greeting message to get started.
inspiration for the game
When it comes down to it, text-based video games are exactly that. No fancy graphics no state-of-the-art game engines, etc. Instead, it's more of a story that you're in control of. The concept is not new, in fact my inspiration for the game comes from a hidden Easter egg built into Mac OS X; a surreal, cyberpunk text adventure titled Dunnet written by Ron Schnell, based on a game he wrote in 1982. Since 1994, the game has shipped with GNU Emacs. You can run it on your Mac with this command in CMD / Bash--
emacs -batch -l dunnet
More about that can be found by
clicking here
.
I first discovered Dunnet back in high school, when I
was
tinkering inside Mac's Terminal. It had to have been about ten years ago? What I enjoy
most
about text-based games is that 1) you can let your imagination kind of run free and 2) you don't
need to spend thousands of hours designing various sprites or other graphics. After all, I'm
just a one-man operation.
Anyway, I sincerely hope that you enjoy playing my very-first published "video" game!
So what's new?
Once complete, Annex's Space Odyssey will be entirely powered by artificial intelligence. The plan is to construct a neural network capable of reading, writing and learning from the player's responses. While still in the very early stages of development, currently the story for the game is statically generated, but still using AI. While writing the story, I am using the OpenAI API to help with all the creative writing. The plan is to complete my own version of the story while simultaneously building the new neural network (as this will be the most difficult aspect of development). Once complete, the player will have a 100% new and unique adventure, every time.
Additionally, I plan to incorporate a Load & Save feature
that will allow players to quit and resume their gameplay at a later time/date. This will simply
store the
player's progression in a database, where the player can load their game by calling a command like
"Load Game". This helps keep the server load and API requests down by force quitting any games after
timing out due to inactivity.