Ages ago, in the basement of an old high school, there was a fervent bunch of coders that should have been working. Instead they had found LambdaMOO. There was a great many hours wasted. Then as it is the wont of startups, things ended and people moved on. The moo was lost.

It was a time of sadness and despair, although that really had nothing to do with the moo.

Anyhow, in that ancient moo I built up a bit of space and was rather fond of it. So rather than have it lost, I’m rebuilding it. I did try for a bit to restart a moo, but damn, I forgot how much trivial stuff we had built. Being lazy but not wanting to let this be lost, I dug around for an alternate route to my goal. Thus I stumbled upon Interactive Fiction.

More importantly, I found compiling tools for it. The first one I found was TADS, and not being very picky, its the one I am using. It does what I wanted, and has enough foundation that I’m not spending time rebuilding little things. (Like chairs.) Also, it is very nice being able to use revision control on this; something that I had always missed in LambdaMOO. I’m using TADS2 because the compiler just worked after I installed it. TADS3 is being a bit of a pain, but I really like the changes they made, so I keep trying to get it to work. Once it does, I want to port this forward.

Right, so I rebuilt the area that I had in that lost moo. (I still have the notebook where I sketched it out.) I did rip a bunch of stuff out, mostly trimming everything down to a nice bite-sized project. Then since this is now a IF game, and not a moo hangout, I twisted a bit of story into it.

You need a game player that supports TADS2 game files. On Macintosh I use Spatterlight. For other systems you’ll need to find what works for you.

So here’s my tiny contribution. Its still beta, but it should all work. Opinions and bug reports welcome.