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 Test
how 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.

A brief visual demo

Getting Started.

Hello! Welcome to Annex's Space Odyssey Adventure Game. To get started, reply with GUIDE for instructions on how to play, LOAD to load a previously saved game or PLAY to start a new game.

Standard text messaging and data rates apply.

Play

You abruptly awake from a deep sleep to a very loud alarm. You jolt up from your cot to see what all the commotion is.

“Hey bro, you better get up here!“ you hear your twin brother call out from the cockpit of the Annex, a Space Exploration and Transport starship constructed in 2159.

Reply with INVESTIGATE...

Investigate

Getting the hang of it.

Go back to sleep.

Are you sure you really want to sleep while the ship's AI is still malfunctioning?

Yea, I better go make those repairs

You have an idea of why the Genetically Advanced Intelligence Assistant, or Gaia for short, keeps malfunctioning. You know it cannot wait and decide to head to engineering.

Once you arrive, it's a simple swap of the burned out nano-capacitors. Everything goes dark for a few moments while all the cooling units spin to a halt. An eerie feeling when it's this quiet but nothing you weren't expecting.

The power recycles and you feel the air whooshing through your hair again.

BETA Application
Compatible with any modern-day mobile device.
Standard text messaging and data rates apply.

DID I MENTION
IT'S FREE?