![]() And that's not just because of the crudeness and simplicity of age early text games, like the inspirational "granddaddy" Colossal Cave (the subject of my " Gaming Made Me" here a few years back), had terse but incredibly useful prose, where generally every detail mentioned was either relevant or clearly demarcated as atmospheric. Initially, the advent of graphics did not make favorable advances on the text game format, as you'll see in the playthrough. It's fair, then, for a pioneer to have made so many mistakes. While computer roleplaying and war games had graphics before this one, it's true that this is the first adventure game with graphics. Mystery House is often erroneously celebrated as the "first graphical game". PlayFabClient.To see this content please enable targeting cookies. "gameItem" : "snake glyph", "filename" : "snake", "initialHide" : true, "clues" : PlayFabClient. By using this toolset, which allows both styling via Tailwind.css and importation of standard Vue.js single-file components, we were able to get better control over the interface and more flexibility in the way we designed it, while keeping the 'vintage' look of the text-based game intact.Īn example of the storytelling-friendly format of the game can be seen by perusing the markdown files that tell the tale of the pyramid exploration: #Mystery house game designer generatorAnd of course, I reached for a tool that was most familiar to me (my blog is built using it): VuePress.Īs a Vue.js developer I immediately gravitated towards VuePress, a static site generator that would work well for storytelling using files written in markdown. I wanted something that would enable many people to write parts of a game or to localize it, and that would be easier to scale and maintain. While Twine worked brilliantly for the Mystery Mansion I wanted to try a tool that gave me a little more design freedom and was a JavaScript-native tool that would foster collaboration. Not to reveal too much, but didn't you always want to chat with a goddess? You'll deploy a chat interface built with React and use Azure Static Web Apps to view it live, learning via chat part of the name of the mysterious pyramid. The first one would be Azure Static Web Apps, and the user would be given a challenge to discover the meaning of one of the three glyphs that makes up the temple's name. By building a scavenger hunt that also pushed users to solve puzzles by actually shipping code, we would showcase product launches progressively over a three-month three part release. In addition, our experience in December with the success of our 25DaysOfServerless event, also a large group effort centered on exploring aspects of Microsoft Azure, provided a supplemental road map for the game. Working with an illustrator who is an expert in creating architectural drawings and reproducing glyphs would ensure its cultural appropriateness, so we contracted with illustrator Dana Moot II to create accurate depictions of a fictional Maya pyramid. We would partner with experts to create a game that taught about Maya glyphs while exploring a mysterious pyramid, encountering surprises along the way. Foremost in my mind was to not spin up an 'Indiana Jones' type mish-mash of exploitative cultural tropes, but to create something genuinely respectful of ancient Maya culture that was both educational and fun.Īnd so our path became plain. We gathered a team of regional PMs and marketing experts to make this idea a reality. Inspired by his work, it struck me that a game centered around ancient Maya culture would resonate with our pan-Americas group with Cloud Advocates and Project Managers who cover Canada, US, and LATAM who were particularly interested in continuing the project. In addition, we wanted to somehow localize the experience to make it more pertinent to a regional audience.Įnter my work with my brother, an Art Historian at Cal State Chico, Matthew Looper. Do we continue with a tour of outbuildings and old antiques stuck in a shed? Somehow the "Mystery Outhouse" doesn't have quite the same panache. But the Mansion storyline ends so nicely, with the user gaining the keys to get the house deeds in the attic, that I couldn't seem to find a good way to continue the trope. We were soon making plans for a V2 of the Mystery Mansion, which I envisioned as a continuation of the old house motif. So big that it caught the imagination of many folks at Microsoft. ![]()
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