Zork on Spark
Who remembers playing Zork ?? It was one of the greatest interactive fiction based games in the 1980s. What if this game could be brought into our Chat rooms in Cisco Spark ? I have been tinkering with developing this for Zork I, II and III for a while now. Finally happy to have launched this bot, hopefully will show up in the Cisco Spark depot some day, but if you want to play this game feel free to add zork@sparkbot.io into a 1-1 room or group room. Type help or @zork help to get some detailed instructions on how to play the game. Zork has a very interactive and intelligent parsing engine. You do not have to type commands in a specific fashion. It does not have to be total verb-nouns like "hit troll" "open mailbox" etc. You can say "take the knife and put it in the bag" etc. If you have not ever played Zork, the game does provide you with clues and tells you where you are, where you can go etc (north, west, east, south etc). The game also tells you your current score, current location and current number of moves you made versus max (999).
Before start playing the game i would heavily recommend you type @zork help or help to read through the detailed help. I am going to use some screenshots here on a 1-1 room with the bot, to keep things simple. If you are in a group room, make sure you @mention the bot. in group rooms, you can play with a friend the same game, so both parties can type commands over time. The game state is always saved per room, so there is no overlap between each instance of game spawned.
I heavily recommend that you take a piece of paper and pen and start drawing a map. Zork will blow your mind away with the amount of imagination you will need to play this game. You have to keep track of where you are in the game, map that location out, as you play the game and open each clue that you find to explore more clues...the game is a puzzle and there are many ways to solve this puzzle so it may take days before which you will finish this game. If you are lost and you need help with a map or walk through, you can always type "map" command. This will provide you with a JPEG or PDF of the map. I heavily recommend you use a pen and paper than using walk throughs and maps but it is available to you.
At any point of the game, if you are stuck in the game, please feel free to reset the game using the reset command. This resets the game back to original state and starts over.
In order to change the system version from Zork 1, 2 or 3, simply type @zork play zork1|2|3 as appropriate. Note there is no space between zork and version number.
To start playing you can use the look command which tells you where you are, what is around and you can continue exploring based on what you see.
It is a very fun game, and the possibilities of finishing this game through multiple paths are very likely. I hope you enjoy this game and let me know your thoughts on this blog post and bot. Watch this Youtube video below to see the bot in action
