Dungeon Adventure

Jubilation reigns in Minas Tirith! At sunset yesterday the city was besieged by a sea of orcs, with more arriving every hour, and it seemed that the defenders were doomed. But at sunrise, the watch looked out over an empty plain - the attackers had given up the assault when on the point of victory.

Initially the only reaction was stunned amazement. But gradually a rumour began to spread: first whispered in quiet corners, lest the telling should make it untrue, but eventually shouted in every street.

"The Demon Lord is dead!"

When this was confirmed by the Wizard's council, a two week carnival was announced - the provisions hoarded against a long siege were lavishly dispensed and the population proceeded to enjoy themselves as you would expect.

But a few people, yourself included, thought along different lines as follows:

1. The Demon Lord must have been very rich;
2. If He really is dead, His treasures may be unguarded;
3. When the orcs marched south they cut a swathe of destruction through the countryside but they moved too fast to completely loot the area;
4. So, if I were to ride swiftly north, I'd have no problem in finding provisions and could probably reach the Black Tower in ten days. The wizards would never have repaired their teleport system by them, so I'd very likely be the first person there.
5. This could make me incredibly rich.

You gather together all the lethal weapons you can get your hands on and leave within the hour.

Instructions

Unlike our other games, Level 9 Adventures contain few instructions within the programs (though there are a lot of hints in room descriptions, etc). We feel that this type of game is very easy to play and that the space is better used for more rooms and puzzles, etc.

The program asks "What next?" whenever it expects you to enter another command. Simply type an English phrase to tell it what you want to do and press RETURN. The program will act on your request, ask you for the next command, and so on.

The program has an extensive vocabulary of English words (over 200) and looks at your entered command, picking out the words it knows and 'guessing' your meaning from these. It only uses two or three words from each phrase, so you are advised to keep instructions simple.

In practice, this works well and you should find it is simple to state what you want to do. If the program does not understand just rephrase your request.

Dungeon Adventure provides considerable freedom in possible commands, but to help you get started some possible instructions are summarised below:

These are only a small sample of the words known by the program. To save typing, words can be abbreviated (e.g. EAST to E and NORTHEAST to NE).

There are also three special commands that you need to know. These are:

QUIT
Abandon the game (you have to answer a Y/N question to check that you mean it, and are given the chance to start over again).

SAVE
Save the current state of play on tape. This is like the ordinary "SAVE" command.

RESTORE
Restore (restart) a previously saved game so that you can carry on with it. This is similar to the ordinary "LOAD" command.

Scoring

You score points for collecting treasures and leaving them in the storeroom. There are also bonuses for getting rid of undesirable beings (though, to discourage massacre, only the worst enemies give you a bonus).

On the debit side, you lose points if you manage to get yourself killed.

Hints

You are entitled to one free clue, and a SAE is enclosed so that you can send any one question to Level 9 if you get stuck. We'll try to reply by the next post. Don't use up the clue too soon - you may waste it on something that you'll work out yourself while the answer is in the post.

Answers will be truthful, but may be cryptic if you try to find out too much. We also reserve the right to give partial answers to questions such as "Please list all the objects in the adventure, with their functions" as they take too much time to answer fully.

1. Almost everything in Dungeon Adventure has a purpose, and you can get an idea as to what this is likely to be by EXAMINing an object.
2. Resurrection is possible, and uses a machine which is initially situated very close to where you start the game. By default, it only works while you remain close to this machine, and you must register your body pattern for it to work at all.
3. The setting for Dungeon Adventure is a "cave network" that was originally the headquarters for the Demon Lord. Some parts are now blocked off by rock falls, but it may help you to bear in mind the original functions (if you can guess them) of the accessible parts.
4. In response to user requests, there are several ways of carrying a lot of objects at once!

Implementation

Dungeon Adventure is written in Level 9's own super compact language known as 'a-code'. To give you an idea of the compaction possible with this, a typical Basic statement is equivalent to four bytes of a-code (approximately). A-code is also faster than Basic.

The text messages are compressed to about half their normal size for storage (and we get further size reduction by only having one copy of messages such as "You are").

Together, these methods of size reduction allow a huge amount of program and text to be squeezed into a small space.

Dungeon Adventure is based around the D&D magic system as modified and used by the Cambridge University Wargames society in the mid 70s. All items and architectural features can be made under this system (or equivalent ones including extensions for demon-produced items) and if you are a D&D player you might like to work out how this can be done.

Note that knowledge of this magic system will not provide any real help with solving the game, however, as it merely provides a theoretical framework.

Loading

Tape: *RUN (RETURN)

If your BBC is modified to add disks, please enter:

*TAPE (RETURN)
*LOAD (RETURN)
CALL &7420 (RETURN)

Disc: Hold SHIFT and tap BREAK.

Note: This game cannot be restarted without loading it again, so don't press BREAK or ESCAPE until you've *really* decided to quit.