Neil's Thoughts

I had scores of hand-drawn maps of Skara Brae.

They were partly a way to avoid getting lost, although I managed that often enough. They were also a way to keep hold of a game I could only play occasionally.

I first played The Bard's Tale in the late 1980s, on a friend's older brother's computer. We did not have unlimited access to it. There would be a chance to play, then a wait of uncertain length before the next one. I could not simply go home and pick up where I had left off.

It was my first real access to role-playing games, and it felt like magic. You made a party and walked into a city that seemed to have far more streets and doors than you could possibly remember. The screen showed you a small piece of it. The rest existed in your head, in the notes you made, and in the hope that the turn you had just taken was the right one.

What I remember most clearly is wandering around Skara Brae, trying to work out where I was, then trying to find my way back to the tavern so I could log out. Our time on somebody else's computer was coming to an end, and I was still lost.

The maps helped. Or at least they made me feel better about being lost. I drew scores of them, carrying part of the city away on paper because I could not carry the game itself away with me.

I do not think games were necessarily better then. Some were awkward, unforgiving, and quite happy to let you spend a precious hour making no obvious progress. Access was part of the experience too. When you only got to play occasionally, the streets had time to become larger in your imagination between visits.

That is the feeling I wanted to revisit when I suggested we build a small game for MyPlace. Not a recreation of The Bard's Tale, but a homage to the part I still remember: a party setting out into a city, opening doors, and needing to find its way home.

Our version is called Town Crawl. It has four adventurers, a Guild, taverns, stores, and twenty rooms whose contents change with each new game. You have 100 moves to explore and return. The map only shows the streets around places you have visited. If you are curious about a door off the road, you can listen before you open it. That may be wise.

Working on it brought back a different part of that old experience. A city has to make sense as a place. At one stage the AI produced a handsome image of a stone corridor. I stopped it: "This isn't a corridor. It's a city." Later, I found that I could walk straight through a room because we had placed it in the middle of the street. We moved the rooms beside the roads, where their doors could actually be approached.

Those sound like small corrections. They mattered to me because the memory I was trying to recover was of wandering through streets, not clicking through a sequence of encounters. A wrong turn should be my mistake, not the game's inability to tell me where the road goes.

There is one obvious omission. You cannot recruit a Bard yet. I know. I looked for one too. The current version is a playable prototype, with fights, discoveries, and a journey back to the Guild, but the larger quest is still to come. The plan is for the tavern to be where you find the Bard, then decide which of your original four adventurers must give up a place in the party.

I have put it on MyPlace because I already enjoy playing it, even with the rough edges. I can return whenever I want now, and the map lives on the screen instead of in a pile of paper. That is progress, I suppose.

What I wanted to keep was the uncertainty at the edge of the known streets. There might be something worth finding behind the next door. You still have to remember how to get home.