Nightfall Online Release Message

2010-05-18

I have a big achievement!

Many of you have probably seen my progress reports on my Time War game. But since last Christmas, I have also been simultaneously working on major another project. Today, it is finished (unless bugs turn up). Given how the timing worked out, I am going to think of it as a sort of Hobbit-style birthday present from me to everyone.

The first major computer game was Colossal Cave Adventure (a.k.a. Adventure, ADVENT). In addition to being wildly popular among the limited subset of people who had access to computers in those days, it also spawned a whole slew of fan games. These, of course, varied in quality and popularity, and most have now been forgotten.

One of these games was Nightfall, written by my father. It was good enough that people would submit bugs, want new versions, and play it when they were supposed to be doing other things. I think that distribution was between 50 and and 100 people at its peak, although I have low confidence on those numbers. My and my brothers have all played it, but it largely passed out of memory.

But the original source code and data files remained. Based on these, I have completely re-implemented the game. The core game is largely the same (I believe I changed 1 link from 1 node), although a number of descriptions have been tweaked (mostly for consistency). However, the interface has been improved. Most important, it now runs in a web page.

So, without further ado, I give you Nightfall Online!


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