jasonlautzenheiser / white-houses

interactive fiction surrounding the white house of Zork

White Houses

An interactive fiction - Sufflecomp Entrant - 2014

Jenny called you late and asked to meet you out here in the middle of nowhere. You've never been this far in the forest before and you never knew this white house was out here. She said she had something important to tell you and she never joked about those kinds of things so you felt it must be important...so you came.....against your best judgement, but you've always been a good friend.....you just hope you don't regret it.

IFDB Page

Shufflecomp, if you're not familiar, is a competition where each entrant is given a list of song titles submitted by others, and our job is to write a short work based on that song (song itself or just the title). In my list of song titles to base the game on, the only one that really jumped out at me was White Houses by Vanessa Carlton whom I had never heard of before and had never heard this song. The name jumped out at me, obviously because of the Zork reference so I decided to take another look at the White House of Zork fame.

This was only my second released game and I was still learning I7 at the time. This was very much a work rushed as the timeline for Shufflecomp was relatively short, so this game was short and lightly implemented. I've always kind of enjoyed this game and while it got mixed reviews during the competition, it is still one of my favorites that I've written (released or not). Shortly after the competition, I released another version that fixed a few obvious bugs and then began planning for a more thorough version that filled in the gaps of implementation and story, expanded the map and things to do and tie it closer to the Zork world and timeline beyond just the setting itself.

And I didn't get much beyond the planning phase, so here we are. I've opened up the source and while I still have plans to expand this out, I7 is lower on my priority list these days so we'll see how far this gets. In the meantime, enjoy the game. Feel free to report bugs and or make suggestions for improvements.

white-houses's Issues

Listen should give some useful responses since we already are hearing some strange noises.

Different responses in different locations as well as during different events,

create some generic responses to common things that aren't important to the game.

Instead of burning something, say "[The noun] can't be burned." 

Instead of cutting something, say "You have no tool with which to cut."

Create tests for various areas.

Might be an issue when first going to cellar that Jenny won't hand you the lantern.

Implement "find Him" as a conversation point after asking jenny about marcus.

Come up with something useful for the coconut

Need more responses for printing a parser error.

Come up with something useful to do in the attic

Implement wash in the kitchen

Something to do with the bottle found in the sink

Fix darkness announcements.

ask jenny about something, before saying hello, triggers the hello statement, but then gives a "No Reply" for an unknown topic.

t sound when jenny is around

Trigger's the initial response but doesn't trigger conversation.

Fix attacking responses other than on marcus