The Second Pit

Storyline and Text by Andrew and Tom Craig
Programmed by Sue Medley (c) 1996

The Second Pit is the second adventure that I have programmed on 
a 16-bit machine, my first being Oklib's Revenge, which I wrote 
using AGT, The Adventure Game Toolkit, from 1990 to 1992. I 
started on The Second Pit almost as soon as Oklib was finished 
and, four years later, finally finished it. At this rate, the next game 
will take eight years to write!

This time I have used TADS, The Text Adventure Development 
System from Michael J Roberts at High Energy Software. I am very 
impressed with TADS; it looks complicated to use but is great once 
you get used to it ... which doesn't take very long. You can do much 
more with it than AGT, High Energy are very good at supporting 
registered users, and I would urge anyone thinking of writing their 
own text adventure to try TADS.

The Second Pit uses traditional text phrase input along the lines of:
North (or other directions)
Get apple
Drop box
Open door
or short phrases such as
Unlock door with key
Hit wolf with baseball bat.
Note, these phrases are not necessarily ones you'll find in The 
Second Pit. 

If you want, you can link sentences with `and' or punctuation eg
Take the book; go east, then take the box and look at it.
`It' refers to the last direct object. `Them' can be used in a similar 
fashion for plurals eg examine the barrels and roll them.

Occasionally you may need to distinguish between two similar 
objects, say, two books. In this case, you will be prompted to add 
an adjective. Just call them `red book' and `blue book' or whatever is 
appropriate or answer `red' or `blue' when you're asked which book 
you mean. Or you could say `both'.

If you try a two word input (unlock door) and it doesn't work, try 
using four words (unlock door with key). Conversely, try two words 
(tie rope) if four don't work. It can pay to be flexible.

Other useful commands are `Inventory' to check what you're 
carrying (abbreviate to `I' if you like), `score' to see how well you're 
doing and `save' and `restore' to save your position to disk (if you're 
about to do something potentially dangerous) and get it back again 
(when the potential danger turns out to be real!). Death is rarely 
final in adventures ... 

If you get stuck, think what you'd do in real life. Examine everything 
you can, try to get it or manipulate it in other ways. Pull and push 
things, try to eat them. Throw them, tie them to stuff, give them 
away to other characters. If all else fails, you can ask me for help by 
phone, letter or Fax at the address given at the end of this file and 
also during the game (just type Help).

I hope you'll enjoy The Second Pit. Andrew and Tom enjoyed 
writing the story and I enjoyed programming it. We hope you like it 
as much. 

To run the game load PIT.GAM into a TADS interpreter.

Thanks, as always, to the playtesters - The Grue, Neil Shipman, 
YAK and Kanga. Special thanks to The Grue who was writing his 
own game Trinity at the same time, also using TADS. We had some 
good programming brainstorming sessions over the phone and his 
help was invaluable.

Enjoy!

Sue Medley, 9 Warwick Road, Sidcup, Kent DA14 6LJ, England
Tel/Fax 0181 302 6598