A short text adventure game hastily made for LibreJam 202204.

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Power Seeker

Power Seeker is a short text adventure where you pick up the role of a young girl venturing into an evil warlock’s keep in order to obtain his mysterious treasure and the great power it is said to hold.

It was made for LibreJam 202204, but altered from the original version to make the game a bit nicer to play, especially by correcting errors and oversights.

This is version 1.1 of the game.

Warning

This game may contain crude humour and violence. If you are very sensitive or a child, please tread the game with care, if at all.

System requirements

You should have a terminal emulator that is able to display Unicode glyphs, and optionally bold or italic text. Failure to display Unicode glyphs whould not make the game unplayable, but would make it look jarring. A scrollable terminal is highly recommended if it cannot show many lines at once. (Some terminal emulators have a toggle for displaying bold text in their settings.)

The game was only tested on Trisquel, a distribution of GNU/Linux, but it should be able to run on other systems as well.

Installation

In order to play the game, you will need a compiler for the Raku programming language. At the moment of writing, there is only one, called ‘Rakudo’. GNU distributions usually ship it in their repositories, under one of these names:

raku
rakudo
perl6

If yours does not, or if you use a different operating system, you can download Rakudo from its website.

You should also have the zlib library installed. It often comes pre-installed on GNU distributions.

The game itself is otherwise shipped with all its dependencies and does not need to be installed. You can put the game directory anywhere you want and run the game by running the script power-seeker. Either run it from your file manager or run this on the command line:

$ ./power-seeker

When started for the first time, the game will be automatically precompiled, which will take a while. Any subsequent starts should be much faster.

How to play

The game will prompt you for input by showing a prompt. You should type in a command and press enter, and if the command is understood your character will try to carry it out. Sometimes you might get a list of numbered choices and have to enter a number to pick one, or you might just have to press enter to get the next message. The look of the prompt will reflect this.

In the introduction to the game, you will be made familiar with all the actions your character is able to perform, including a unique one specific to their profession. Most commands can be given using different words, so you don’t have to remember a list of precise words; whether you tell your character to ‘see something’ or ‘look at something’, she will understand. Hopefully this will make the experience a bit more comfortable.

Legal information

This game is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This game is also free culture: you can copy, distrubute and modify all of the prose in the game under the terms of the Fre Art License as published by Copyleft Attitude. (There’s an exception for a piece of poetry.)

Some non-original works have been reused in the game. Please find more information about those below. Any applicable licences are to be found in the licences directory.

Non-original free works

About Kocian and the Innkeeper Who Had a Firm Hand

This short story which appears in the game also falls under the Free Art License. (Written by me, but not for this project.)

Compress::Zlib

This module is used by the game code and falls under the Expat License.

Compress::Zlib::Raw

This module is used by Compress::Zlib and falls under the Expat License.

Terminal::ANSIColor

This module is used by the game code and falls under the Expat License.

Terminal::Width

This module is used by the game code and falls under The Artistic License 2.0.

Text::Wrap

This module is used by the game code and falls under The Artistic License 2.0.

The Bartered Bride

Public Domain

A part of this libretto by Karel Sabina appears in the game.

Spanish Ladies