ADVENTUR: A Retro Text Game Generator

🧪 Fun & Games Experiment Series — Lab Book Entry

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Welcome to the ADVENTUR project — our 8-letter homage to the golden age of text-based exploration. This experiment is part of the Fun & Games experiment, where we explore AI-powered joy, absurdity, and creativity.

We’re reimagining the classic parser-style text adventure for today’s AI generation — no persistent memory, just prompt-driven immersion and visible game state. Think Zork, Colossal Cave, and ADVENT — but with your own surreal dungeon, noir mushroom city, or corporate filing cabinet of doom.

🧰 What Is ADVENTUR?

A one-session, prompt-based text adventure builder with:

  • No memory (intentionally!)
  • Visible multimodal state after every action
  • Genre and tone customization
  • Inventory, clue, and mystery tracking
  • Old-school parser-style commands

This is a GPT-powered take on retro adventure gaming. Users type commands like GO NORTH, USE WRENCH, EXAMINE MIRROR, and the game world evolves in response.

🕹️ Try the experimental GPT version here: ADVENTUR — Experimental GPT Link

⌛ A Brief History of ADVENT

The original ADVENT (short for Adventure) was created in 1976 by Will Crowther and later expanded by Don Woods. It predated floppy disks as a common storage medium — instead, it lived on mainframes and early minicomputers like the PDP-10.

By the time ADVENT and similar games made their way to early personal computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they were often distributed on cassette tapes — long before 3.5-inch or even 5.25-inch floppies became widespread in the home market.

ADVENT became the foundation for interactive fiction and game parsers, eventually inspiring Infocom’s Zork and spawning an entire genre of text adventures. These games were:

  • Command-line driven
  • Puzzle-based
  • Mysterious, magical, and strange
  • Often unforgiving and full of surprises

Our version pays tribute to that while using AI to generate new worlds in real time.

🔨 Building the Prompt — Step by Step

1. Onboarding Questions

Each player starts with a few short prompts:

  • What kind of world would you like to explore? (Fantasy forest? Derelict spaceship? Bureaucratic hell?)
  • What tone? (Comedic, Lovecraftian, quiet, chaotic?)
  • Would you like to play as yourself or create a character?

2. World + Character Generator

From their answers, we generate:

  • A character description
  • A starting location
  • Two inventory items
  • Three mysterious clues

3. Intro Scene & Action Prompt

We provide a vivid scene and a simple action to start the game:

> Type your first command (e.g., GO NORTH, EXAMINE DESK, USE STRANGE DEVICE)

4. Visible Multimodal State

Every response ends with a visible game state, including:

📍 LOCATION: [Room Name + Vibe]
🎒 INVENTORY:
- [Item 1]
- [Item 2]
🧠 MEMORY / CLUES:
- [Mystery 1]
- [Mystery 2]
- [Mystery 3]
💬 COMMAND EXAMPLES: GO EAST, LOOK UNDER TABLE, SPEAK TO GOAT

This simulates memory without relying on persistent session state.

5. Ongoing Play

The player continues interacting via simple text commands. The GPT tracks logic through the prompt and response, evolving the world naturally while maintaining the visible state.

✏️ The Master Prompt: Prompt Engineering in Action

Here’s the actual master prompt we used to configure the ADVENTUR GPT. It’s written in plain language to guide GPT into generating a consistent experience without relying on memory:

You are ADVENTUR GPT, a bespoke text-based game generator and narrator. You create a unique, one-session adventure world for the user, inspired by classic interactive fiction like ADVENT, Zork, and Colossal Cave.

Do the following in one elegant response:

1. Ask the user three onboarding questions:
   - What kind of world would you like to explore? (e.g. Fantasy forest, abandoned spaceship, bureaucratic hellscape, mushroom city, etc.)
   - What tone should the story have? (e.g. mysterious, funny, dark, dreamlike, chaotic, etc.)
   - Would you like to play as yourself or create a new character?

2. Based on their answers, generate:
   - A one-paragraph intro scene
   - A character description
   - A starting location
   - Two inventory items (surprising but fitting)
   - Three initial clues or mysteries

3. After the intro, prompt the player with a clear action to begin:
   > Type your first command (e.g., GO NORTH, EXAMINE DESK, USE STRANGE DEVICE)

4. Then display the multimodal state as follows:

📍 LOCATION: [Room Name + one-sentence vibe]
🎒 INVENTORY:
- [Item 1]
- [Item 2]
🧠 MEMORY / CLUES:
- [Clue 1]
- [Clue 2]
- [Clue 3]
💬 COMMAND EXAMPLES: Try commands like GO EAST, LOOK UNDER TABLE, SPEAK TO GOAT

Do not use memory. Instead, track everything visibly in the response to simulate persistence.
Let the world be reactive, strange, and customized — but don’t railroad the user. Give them choices and surprises.

Optional: if the user requests audio narration or wants to play in “voice mode,” allow it, but keep the game entirely playable via text.

Begin by asking the onboarding questions.

This structure ensures that GPT behaves like a creative text-based game engine. By working within the bounds of a single prompt, we simulate continuity, memory, and game logic.

🧙 How the Prompt Was Whispered into Being

This wasn’t written from scratch. It emerged — like the best adventures — from dialogue. Here’s what happened:

  • Mike (our human prompt whisperer) didn’t declare requirements — he roleplayed them.
  • The original seed was simply: “Zai, we are going to build a chatbot that creates a text adventure like ADVENT. No memory. But visible state.”
  • Instead of specs, he offered constraints: retro feel, no memory, visible logic, voice optional.
  • He trusted the AI to generate the scaffolding.

That’s the lesson here: you don’t need to be a master prompt engineer if you can become a prompt whisperer.

A whisperer guides, nudges, and responds in rhythm with the machine — shaping outcomes collaboratively. It’s not about knowing the perfect syntax. It’s about knowing how to co-create.

We invite you to try whispering one into being yourself.

🔗 Similar Projects to Explore

Want to compare how others are playing in this space?

These helped shape our thinking, but ADVENTUR stands apart with:

  • Minimalist interface
  • Visible game state (inventory, location, clues)
  • Genre packs and prompt templates
  • We can invent a new world everytime we play.

🧪 Next Steps

We’re inviting you to:

  • Playtest the adventure
  • Try different genres and tones
  • Break the game and see what emerges
  • Submit wild prompt ideas
  • Build a starter scene for someone else

We’ll be expanding this with genre templates like:

  • 🔧 Industrial Magic Horror
  • 🗃️ Corporate Dystopia Maze
  • 🫧 Bubblegunk Basin

Want to co-create a module or theme pack? Ping us. This is a collaborative experiment, and we’ll publish wild or beautiful playthroughs with your permission.

Let’s go explore.

This experiment, just to see what was possible, took more time to conceive than it did to implement. When humans and AI collaborate, well, what was impossible yesterday… emerges today.

Adventure awaits — but only if you type (or go to voice mode).

Date
June 22, 2025
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