- Stephen Nichol
Vegadvent Discontinued
After two years of on-off tinkering with my indie text adventure engine Vegadvent, I have decided to discontinue development to make way for new projects.
Vegadvent was so- called because it was intended to allow existing and new text adventures to be ported to the original (no-screen) ZX Spectrum Vega plug and play.
Many of my ideas worked and it proved to be an educational experience, in particular in the use of arrays and GOSUB...RETURN loops.
Vegadvent may have proved that you can run a text adventure on a device that only has a D-pad and several buttons but, beyond that it isn't really a necessity. In particular - you needed a real Spectrum or an emulator with a keyboard to make a Vegadvent adventure in the first place.
If you have either of those already then you're most of the way there to being able to play many of the multitude of 1980s and 1990s text adventures.
It's true to say that the 2015 Vega has a built-in virtual keyboard as well, which tries to solve the problem of text adventuring on a plug and play. Some people like it.
In closing, whether or not it was intended to, the recent Sam Mallard adventure 'Case of the Missing Swan' - released on the ZX Spectrum earlier this year - presented a menu driven solution, that suits the Vega or joystick control perfectly. That's the route I would go down if I made a sequel to Vegadvent.
Thanks for reading,
Stephen