Tuesday, March 05, 2013

Eamon Micro-Adventure Contest

The March 2013 Newsletter has been completed and will be posted soon. In the meantime, enjoy another preview of its contents: an Eamon micro-adventure writing contest!

If you've read through the old NEUC and EAG newsletters, you've undoubtedly run across one of the contests held years ago. (This is why there are about a billion Eamons mentioning a "Life Orb.") They tended to produce some pretty solid adventures. Of course, actually sitting down to write an Eamon is a pretty daunting task. While it's certainly a lot of fun, to write an entire adventure requires some investment of time. So here's the compromise:

Consider a large Eamon dungeon in the shape of a tower. The challenge is to write in approximately ten rooms a miniature dungeon making up one floor of the tower using either Apple II Eamon or Eamon Deluxe. You can add monsters, treasures, secret doors, and weapons... whatever your mind can generate, so be it. Frank and I will string them together into a (dis)continuous whole and judge on the basis of pure awesomeness.

The winner will receive a plaque on the glorious Wall of Fame (in Frank Black's Waiting Room micro-adventure) to be memorialized for all eternity. (We'll throw in a free subscription to the newsletter as well.)

You, reader, are afforded the opportunity to make your mark on the Wonderful World of Eamon without taking three months of spare time to do so. Grab a few beers and a pencil, fire up the Adventure Designer, and in an evening you too can be part of Eamon history.

Here are the rules:
  1. The target is around ten rooms. If you want to dip your toes in, we'll accept fewer. If you're an old hat, we'll accept more.
  2. Dungeons must include a staircase leading up and a staircase leading down at some point in the dungeon so that we can weave the entries together.
  3. No special programming. Frank has equipped Eamon Deluxe with enough built-in functionality that you can produce a number of effects without hassle.
  4. If you want to go all House of Ill Repute on us... well, please don't. A few salty allusions are one thing but bear in mind that there may be children writing entries. For some reason, I'd feel awkward leaving Sesame Street and climbing the stairs to Return to the Cat House
  5. Submissions must be written in either Eamon 7.x or 8.x for the Apple II or Eamon Deluxe 5.0 for other platforms.
  6. As a special feature, entering a value of 1 in the User #1 value of a monster will ensure both that the monster's friendliness doesn't change and that the monster is invincible.
And that's all. If you want to keep in a medieval motif, feel free. If you want to go all high-tech, feel free. If you want to recreate your local Starbucks Coffee, replete with that cute barista who hooks you up with free mochachinos, go ahead (just bear Rule 4 in mind).

If you would like to participate but want assistance, you can write me at tfeamon [at] gmail.com or Frank at eamondeluxe [at] gmail.com. We'll be glad to help.

Submissions may be sent as disk images (for Apple II entries) or compressed folders (for EDX entries) to the above addresses by June 1st, 2013 to be considered. While the competition has closed, we still welcome any additional contributions while the entries are combined. 

5 comments:

T Ferguson said...

I just wanted to make a few comments:

For one, I want to stress that this is not merely an Eamon Deluxe event. Not only are we planning on releasing the final product as an Apple II disk image, we're accepting entries in this format as well--ProDOS or DOS 3.3 are welcome. If you're partial, we'll be glad to accept contributions written for the Atari ST, Commodore 64, or Walker PC Eamons, though we won't be releasing the results in these formats.

Furthermore, for those interested in such things, I thought that I'd mention that the inspiration for the contest is the dada game "Exquisite Corpse." Anyone who has played this game knows that results can be a bit bizarre; such an individual also knows that it's a lot of fun.

Finally, I'd like to thank Wade Clarke for putting the word out with the interactive fiction community. If you're a standard IF-type person, we'd love to see an entry from you. If you've never tinkered with Eamon, I encourage you to give it a try and suspect that you'll be pleased with what you find.

Matthew said...

Sounds like fun! Maybe you'll get more than the three entries from the Orb contest... ;-)

Frank - Eamon Deluxe said...

Well there are actually four entries right now, but they were written by Thomas, myself and my kids. Of course the first two are automatically disqualified for obvious reasons...

It's also fair to note that, while the micro adventures can indeed be created using any version of Eamon on any system, writing it with Eamon Deluxe 5.0 will give the author the largest amount of options and flexibility to customize their world without actually doing any special programming.

A good example of this is Eamon Deluxe 5.0 Demo Adventure itself. For those interested, the Demo Adventure can be downloaded in a (Windows only) stand alone format from the Eamon Deluxe homepage:
http://www.eamonag.org/pages/eamondx.htm

Anonymous said...

I hope that any of these eamons will be playable by the blind as well! Not sure if I'll write an adventure myself, however I can't wait to see what people come up with!

Raquel said...

It seems people are getting a bit more excited after all. Many thanks going to T Ferguson for all of his efforts, especially the renewed inspiration when the previously "locked out" email was cracked back open. I felt addicted instantly, much like when the first Mario Bros came along. Also many thanks for the blog post referencing the attention on the blog here:

http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2013/03/game-93-eamon-1980.html#comment-form

I see 34 comments there as of just now....there may be a need for another file clerk after all.

I love the idea and hope to see more than three newcomers.
Don't give up hope on things now Matt (; You held Eamon through the quiet times and the faithful are not unnoticed. Whether you were busy with life and mini people or law school, you still kept this all going, feedback or not. Thank you! I can appreciate the joke though too. When the demo was released I expected more feedback and then felt silly for getting all excited given the past history of the fan-base interaction. Disqualified or not I'll be very interested to see what even one person has to say about the nonsensical ideas and very unique humor of a certain ginger-headed six year old. I've had something in mind to add to the contest as well. It's unfinished though of course, per my usual style of spending more time trying to prioritize the to-do list than checking items off of it. Speaking of, I should be adding "Get in touch with Wade Clarke for questions" to that list...and stop procrastinating the two papers I'm supposed to be working on right now.