Excalibur : Sword of Kings

King Arthur has been imprisoned in Camelot Castle by the evil sorceress Crania. It's up to you, Arthur's trusted fellow, to gain access to Camelot, defeat the evil minions of the sorceress, to recover Excalibur, to confront and defeat Crania, and to wake King Arthur up from his enchanted sleep.

Visit adventuron.io (on a desktop PC) for the partner tutorial on how to code THIS GAME, step by step, using Adventuron Classroom.

Excalibur: Sword of Kings is an authorised remake of the ZX Spectrum game - made using the Adventuron text adventure authoring system.

Excalibur is an old-school text adventure, with easy difficulty.

This game incorporates an interactive tutorial into the first half of the (very short) game.

 Hopefully this game will be a good starting point for introducing friends to the charms of traditional text adventure games.

First game in the TALP (Text Adventure Literacy Project) series.

How To Play

Excalibur requires that the player types commands either by a hardware keyboard, or if on mobile platforms, software keyboards. 

All commands should be ONE WORD or TWO WORDS.

To navigate, type one of the following commands (directions can also be clicked with mouse or touched on a touchscreen):

• NORTH or N
• SOUTH or S
• EAST or E
• WEST or W
• UP or U
• DOWN or D

If the player wants to take a ladder, type:

• GET LADDER or TAKE LADDER

If the player wants to drop the ladder, type:

• DROP LADDER

If the player wants to examine the ladder, type:

• EXAMINE LADDER or X LADDER.

If the player wants to redescribe the current location:

• LOOK

If the player wants to see what they are holding:

• INVENTORY or I

If the player wants to save or load the game:

• SAVE
• LOAD

If the player wants to do something, they should type the command in verb noun format - such as :

• DRINK MILK
• THROW SPOON
• DUNK BISCUIT

The requires the player to figure out the correct commands to resolve obstacles they face in the game.

Are there any enhancements?

• Interactive Tutorial Mode
• Some minor grammar fixes.
• Minor graphic adjustments.
• Minor tweaking of responses.
• New Font.
• Direction links are clickable / touchable.
• Sound Effects.
• Faster game flow.
• Autosave functionality.
• Mobile Support.
• Basic Scanline Emulation.
• Screen Reading Support.

Other than these, this is a straight remake.  No additional puzzles have been added.  

Is this a port or a remake?

It's a remake. 

What is the purpose of the remake?

1. To act as a means for young players, unfamiliar with text adventures,  to become familiar with the concept and the tropes (first game in the Text Adventure Literacy Project (TALP) series).
2. To act as another example of a type of game that can be authored with the Adventuron authoring system.
3. To fly the flag for illustrated text adventures.
4. As an experiment to see if the "feel" of 8 bit adventures was fully achievable without emulation.
5. To as a tribute to the game I bought and loved as a child.

Credits

• Original Authors (1987) - Ian Smith & Shaun McClure.
• Adventuron Version / Tutorial Mode (2019) - Chris Ainsley

Future Enhancements

A future release will support voice input. 

Release Notes

• 1.0.0 - Released 2019/04/22 - First release
• 1.0.1 - Released 2019/04/23 - Removed overt spoiler for first puzzle, and added HINT in place.
• 1.0.2 - Released 2019/04/24 - Fixed background colour on ending screen.
• 1.0.3 - Internal Build
• 1.0.4 - Internal Build
• 1.0.5 -Released 2021/02/07 - Updated tutorial, and put used auto redescribe template.
• 1.0.6 Released 2021/02/14 - Updated to add additional noun responses based on nouns in the descriptive text.
• 1.0.7 Released 2021/02/14 - Added some text to describe the demon knight.

Copyright

Excalibur, Sword of Kings - (C) Adventuron Software Limited, All Rights Reserved.

About Adventuron Classroom

Adventuron Classroom is an game building toolkit for building text adventure games -in the browser (editor requires desktop PC). 

Ideal as a introduction to coding for 8-12 year olds, Adventuron Classroom features a full course on how to develop a full retro-style text adventure game..

It features tooling to make it easy to code, right inside the browser. 

Export the game as HTML, ready to be published on Itch or other platforms.