First on Gopher, then in LaTeX, it started becoming apparent that I have a predilection towards short, one-shot Choose Your Own Adventure-style stories on strange mediums. So in that vein, I decided to make another one, but this time played via a phone call made to a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) number attached to a virtual PBX.
To do this, I firstly needed a VoIP number. Thankfully my ISP (iiNet) provides a free VoIP number to NBN customers, so that was covered.
Not long after I completed the Gopher Maze that I’ve written about previously, my friend @shmouflon and I embarked on another Gopher project; writing a Choose Your Own Adventure-style short story told through Gopher directory pages.
We completed the project later in the year during August and were content to have ridden that wave of creativity for a while. However we were struck by an idea: what if we could use other oft-forgotten or much-maligned technology to create something new from this?
Preamble A long time ago I built a Twitter bot which allowed you to play a text adventure game by tweeting commands at it and receiving personalised responses. I’ve always been interested in doing more with this project, but there’s been two major holdups:
I’ve lacked personal writing inspiration (and found no interested writers) to help with content for the game. The original code is an absolute mess. Eventually during a skint section of my life I had to get rid of the virtual machine that runs the bot and it’s remained dormant and inactive for years.
TL;DR: Play my little game here for web users or at gopher://gopher.judges119.me:70/labyrinth for Gopher users.
Gopher I’ve written some posts recently about the Gopher protocol and how I’ve been exploring and playing around with it a bit. I don’t know what attracts me to it so much, potentially just the simplicity of it, the relatively unknown nature of it across the modern web/dev crowd, or even just the desire to resuscitate a dead standard.