Tristam Island
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Description
Cross-platform adventure game, running under Pro-DOS
"After crashing your plane at sea, you end up drifting to a small island, with not much to survive. You explore, and find out the island was inhabited, years ago. But why did the people leave? And why is there a fence around that big building at the top of the hill?"
Demo attached here, for full version see https://hlabrande.itch.io/tristam-island
TRISTAM ISLAND is a text adventure made from the mold of Infocom; expect a large geography to explore, lots of prose, a rich parser, diverse puzzles, some humor and some darkness. To use Infocom's classification, I'd rate the game's difficulty as "Standard"; however, the game's design is modern and eschews all the frustrations commonly associated with 1980s text adventures. No hunger timers, no frustrating mazes, no blocking situations that force you to restart!
By buying this game, you get disk images for 36 different platforms:
- Commodore PET, VIC-20, Plus/4, Commodore 64 and 128, and also a MEGA65 version;
- Atari 8-bit (400, 800, XL, XE), and the Atari ST;
- Amiga (all the way back to the 500);
- Spectrum +3;
- Amstrad CPC & PCW;
- MSX 1 & MSX 2;
- BBC Model B, BBC Model B+, BBC Master 128, and Acorn Electron;
- Apple II, Macintosh, and OS X;
- 16-bit MS-DOS, Windows (32 and 64 bit);
- Linux (32 and 64 bit);
- TI-99/4A, and also a port for the TI-84+CE calculator;
- Oric Atmos & Telestrat;
- TRS CoCo;
- Nintendo GameBoy, GameBoy Advance, and Nintendo DS;
- Dreamcast.
You also get the naked ".z3" file to run in your favourite interpreter, allowing you to play on any platform with a Z-Machine interpreter, including the Spectrum Next, the Raspberry Pi, the Palm Pilot, etc. Instructions are also available for CP/M machines (Osborne I, Kaypro II, DEC Rainbow, but also the PC-88), and for the TRS-80 Model III. You won't find many games that can be played on that many platforms!
I hope you'll enjoy the game, please leave a comment if you did! You can support my work by paying more than the displayed price, or by buying one of the physical versions when they come out. Thank you!
Screenshots
Instructions
- Insert the "ProDOS-2-2.dsk" disk and start your Sam Coupé (or your emulator).
- Insert the disk corresponding to "tristam-samcoupe.cpm".
- Move to the corresponding drive, by typing for instance "B:" (you can type "DIR" to see the contents of the disk in the drive you are currently in; the disk for "Tristam Island" has 5 files, including "LOAD.COM")
- Type "LOAD"
- The game then starts.
Example of inputs recognized by the game are: go east, examine sky, inventory, enter ocean, take pebble, open matchbook. Around 100 verbs are recognized by the game.
There are no built-in hints in the game (there just isn't the space!), so I encourage you to ask other players for help!
If you encounter a bug, or if a sensible command wasn't recognized, or if you want to give me any sort of feedback, don't hesitate to send me an email : hugo at hlabrande dot fr.
Trivia
MANY THANKS TO
- Infocom, creators of the Z-Machine and of so many awesome adventure games that we're still using their tools 40 years later;
- Graham Nelson, creator of Inform 6;
- Andrew Plotkin, for his hard work and dedication to fixing the Inform 6 compiler's bugs that had prevented z3 releases for years;
- Fredrik Ramsberg and Johan Berntsson, for the amazing PunyInform library, and many optimizations;
- My testers: Manon Burz-Labrande, CrocMiam, Steve Flintham, Grimmnebulin, Brennen Kinch, Juhana Leinonen, Samuel Verschelde, Mark Walker, Jack Welch;
- The players who reported bugs in the initial release: Davide Bucci, Chris Carter, Wade Clarke, Denk, Richard Hawkins, Christopher Merrimer, Brian Rushton, Tiffany Zhao;
- Stefan Vogt, for his help setting up many ports of this game, and his detailed answers to my technical questions.
For the Sam Coupé version in particular:
- SamsterDave for his help for the loading screen;
- Stephen F. Winsor, for the game's logo;
- Karen Christie, for the painting that serves as cover art.