Welcome! Starting the Lethe Project

On June 16, 2022, the followers of Aaron A. Reed's 50 Years of Text Games substack received "Bonus Article:Amnesia. The doomed text game from a lauded sci-fi writer with ambitions too big for its disks".

It's a fascinating read, describing how leading science fiction writer Thomas M. Disch and a talented programmer Kevin Bentley wrote 1986's Amnesia computer game.  He includes links to the original manuscript, a browser emulation of the original game, and 'Amnesia Restored' - an expanded version produced by a large team of students and faculty at Washington State University.

Disch's manuscript runs 436 pages, containing too much material to fit on the floppy disks in most PCs in 1986.  The content represents a challenge to the parser-based user interface common to interactive fiction of the era.  It reads like narrative, with some implementation suggestions.

The original Amnesia, and Amnesia Restored, match text typed by the player to choices in the script.  This requires the player to guess what to type and for the programmer to guess what sorts of things might be typed.  If both sides get this right, the story can proceed.

I've played a lot of parser-based games; it can work pretty well when you are applying the same set of verbs to new objects you encounter as you move from room to room.

>N  

You go North.  You are in the parlour. You see a hammer and an old book.

> TAKE HAMMER

You are in the parlour.  You have a hammer. You see and old book.

It doesn't work so well with the narrative in Disch's script.  An example from Amnesia Restored:

You know that you are X and that you must answer the voice truthfully, but your mouth is dry, your tongue paralyzed with fear. "Come here, X," the voice insists. "Come here to me, in the mirror."
> no

You tell yourself to no, but something prevents you. Your acts seem not to be your own. And the voice repeats its command: "Come here, X. Come here to me, in the mirror."

"no" is a reasonable response.  Amnesia Restored will only proceed if you enter something that contains the word "mirror", as hinted by the underlining.

The Lethe Project

I decided to explore implementing a game from Disch's script that presents choices for the player to choose from instead of typing text. For example:

"Come here, X," the voice insists. "Come here to me, in the mirror."

Go to the mirror

Turn away

After some prototyping, I approached the executor of Disch's literary estate and received permission to create a game and make it publicly available to be played over the internet. 

Named Lethe after the Greek spirit of forgetfulness and oblivion, it's a personal interest project with no commercial ambitions.  I've agreed to take the game down in the event that a commercial project requires exclusivity.

Ink

I'm using Ink, an open source programming language optimized for creating computer games with a complex narrative that is influenced by player choices.  Ink was created by Inkle Studios and used extensively in their games, of which Heaven's Vault is a personal favourite.

Most of the game's source code will be written in Ink using Inky, with a limited amount of web stuff (Javascript, HTML, CSS) in the user interface.

I'm learning as I go, so I've started this blog to share some of my decisions and insights as I progress.  I will share some code excerpts, but not the full source of the project. At some point, I will release playable partial implementations, likely on itch.io.