So much fun: recreating 1970s text adventure games using LLMs, but better

In the late 1970s, I worked long hours on a text based adventure game called land of the dwarf for the Apple II computer. My game was written in Apple Basic and I gave it away for free. I wrote it using a huge sheet of paper, drawing a transition network diagram with bubbles, locations and action codes for things that could be done and arcs between the bubbles being the ability to move from one location to another. Yesterday I was really in the mood to do something fun. We didn’t have anything going on for Fourth of July celebrations until an outdoor symphony in the early afternoon, so I sat down in the morning with Google‘s excellent Gemini CLI coding agent and I described what I wanted, which was to be able to input a story context as a text input file and then use an LLM in a conversation loop and continuously provide you with the text based adventure program experience. I was really surprised how well it turned out. Fun!

The generated adventure game code uses a local model running on Ollama - that is the way 😃