Welcome to the Adventure creation quickstart guide! If you're hoping to get your feet wet learning how to create an Adventure, you've come to the right place. Following the 10 steps below, you'll have a simple Adventure up and running in no time!
While we aren't going to cover any particularly advanced mechanics in this guide, we'll cover more than enough to get you on your way making Adventures on par with the Quest for the Icy Soul roleplay event.
Imagine you’ve made a great Adventure, and people have been playing it. After seeing it in action for a bit, you discover you can make it better by changing some of the commands around. Maybe you’ve decided that the Adventure plays better if, in the Stone Cell, any Adventurer can open the door once the key has been found (instead of just the player that found the key). To accomplish this, in the “get key” command, you set a global variable has_key. Then, in the “keyhole” command, instead of checking if {has_item:1}, you check if {var:has_key}. Great!
But guess what. Someone was in the middle of playing your Adventure. They had already collected the key before you made this change, so their Adventure never got the “has_key” variable set. Now they’re trying to unlock the door, but the “keyhole” command isn’t checking for the item, it’s checking for the variable… so they can never leave the cell.
You just broke their Adventure. If this was well into a large Adventure, you just made them very sad. Not great at all.
To solve this problem, the Adventure System operates on a Publish Model. Before anyone can embark on your Adventure, you need to publish it. Publishing takes your Adventure, makes a complete read-only snapshot of it, and assigns a version number to this snapshot. When people embark on your Adventure, they are in fact embarking on your most recent snapshot. No changes that you make to the Adventure will affect their instance.
When you make changes to your Adventure, you can publish a new version. When you do, everyone that embarks on your Adventure will embark on your new version, but people who are already adventuring will stay on whatever version was current when they embarked. Adventurers on old or out-of-date versions of your Adventure have the option of upgrading to the latest version, but cannot downgrade to a previous version.
Some changes, such as the one described in the introduction to this section, run the risk of breaking people’s instances of your Adventure. Other changes, such as fixes to typos in forum posts, cannot possibly break anything. For this reason, the publish tool asks you about whether your change could break an instance of your Adventure, and to briefly summarize the changes that you made. That way, Adventurers can make an informed decision about whether (or when) to upgrade their instance.
Before we publish this Adventure, head back to the Adventure Metadata page in the Tools menu, and make sure that it has the Tutorial tag. Having this tag enabled will prevent the Adventures created by everyone following this guide from cluttering up the Adventure selection screen. Once you’ve confirmed that the Tutorial tag is set, and have made any other desired changes to your Adventure’s metadata, click on “Quick Start Adventure” in the breadcrumbs menu towards the top of the page to get back to your Adventure management page, then click “Publish Adventure” in the Tools menu.
Depending on the size of your Adventure, the Publish Adventure page may take a few moments to load. It’s busily checking over every component of your Adventure, trying to automatically detect errors that you might have made. It’s not perfect — it can’t infer what you meant to do — but it will catch things like trying to refer to items or commands that don’t exist, syntax errors in your command actions, and so on. If there are no errors, you’ll be able to click the “Publish!” button to make your Adventure available to others.
If you’re looking for further reading, check out the sections on Expressions and Variables in the Reference Guide.
These are extremely powerful features that will supercharge your Builder abilities.