Created for the Treasure Hunt Jam - March 2020.

You started working at Tastybuns Burgers when you dropped out of college last year, and it's been a great job. But now that a Burgercorp Burgers franchise has opened across the street, your customers are leaving in droves! It's time to get busy trying to turn Tastybuns Burgers' fortunes around, before you're out of a job!

The goal of the game is to collect four "treasures" (items that will help to save Tastybuns Burgers), and drop them at Tastybuns Burgers, the game's starting location. Explore the town and talk to the residents to figure out what those treasures are, and how to get them. Hint: The names of treasure objects are colored differently to regular objects.

All recognized commands are either a single VERB, or a two-word VERB NOUN phrase. Useful verbs include: N(orth), S(outh), E(ast), W(est), U(p), D(own), (e)X(amine), L(ook), READ, LISTEN, GET, TAKE, DROP, TALK [to a person], SAY [a word], TURN, PRINT,  MAKE, CLEAN, WEAR, REMOVE, GIVE, SHOW.

The verb USE is not recognized by the program, other than to tell you to try another command. If a particular item is required to execute a command, you do not need to specify the item; as long as everything you need is in your inventory or the current location, the game will allow the action.

TALKing to people in the game world doesn't just provide nice background, but in many cases provides vital hints and can even be necessary to progress. "Conversations" are typically navigated by typing "TALK (person)", and if you are asked a question, responding with "SAY (one-word answer)". Please keep in mind that if you leave a location, or TALK to another person at the same location, you will no longer be TALKing to the first person.

This game has been written in Adventuron, an online text-adventure creation environment designed to be easy to use and teach basic programming principles to school students. I went from reading about the Treasure Hunt Jam to learning about Adventuron, conceiving the game and then developing it in the space of 34 hours. The highly-constrained jam ruleset aside, I hope that you'll forgive any rough edges. There were a couple of parts of my original design that I cut due to time constraints, including a scoring system with sub-optimal solutions for some puzzles, and a much longer sequence in the City Hall, but it's nice to have a finished project.

UPDATE 2020/03/13: At the suggestion of the organizer, I have spent a couple of hours polishing some parts of the game, incorporating some feedback from players.

Development log

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