The Hideout Text Adventure

Sample gameplay from The Hideout Text Adventure.

The Hideout Text Adventure (actual title: The Hideout Theatre Adventures: Quest for the Secret Skull) is an interactive-fiction game that takes place in and around the Hideout Theatre.

History

The game originated in a facebook discussion on January 9th, 2012 about setting up a possible text-adventure-themed show at the Hideout, a production that could be paired with Pick Your Own Path.

Brad Hawkins then jokingly wrote out a walk-through of a (nonexistent) text-adventure game set at the Hideout, and Peter Rogers ran with the idea, quickly coding up more and more complicated iterations of a Hideout-themed game in Inform 7. Eventually, Peter met with Kevin Miller and Marc Majcher to plan out the rest of the game, and quickly completed the code on his own on January 21st.

Gameplay

As with most interactive fiction games, the player interacts with the game engine via text -- the player reads prose descriptions of places, items, and events, and types text commands such as "CLIMB THE STAIRS", "PICK UP THE TICKET", or "TALK TO KAREEM". The game is based around a fairly simple storyline: the beloved Skull on a Stick has gone missing at the Hideout, and it's up to you to find it.

More Information

• The facebook discussion that prompted the game.
• The thread devoted to solving the game on The Austin Improv Forums.
• The game itself, playable in your browser.
• The source code for the game.