Lantern; Hexcodle; JS Challenger

Lynn’s newsletter is where you really want to go if you like games. We’re covering some in today’s Drop due to the discovery mentioned in the first section. The last two sections are more “learning games” than proper games.

TL;DR

(This is an AI-generated summary of today’s Drop.)

(I did not modify the prompt, but the links are back!)

• Lantern: The blog post reminisces about the classic text-based adventure game, Zork I, highlighting its development by MIT students and its significant contributions to interactive fiction and natural language processing. The post introduces “Lantern,” a modern way to experience Zork I through a JavaScript and D3 powered interface that automatically generates maps as players explore, available at Lantern and its GitHub repository GH.
• Hexcodle: A brief introduction to “Hexcodle,” an online game designed to test and improve players’ knowledge of RGB hex colors. The game offers a fun and educational challenge with multiple difficulty settings and the option to use decimal RGB codes, accessible at Hexcodle.
• JS Challenger: This section discusses “JS Challenger,” a platform that provides JavaScript coding challenges to help improve coding skills. The challenges range from novice to expert levels and cover various topic areas, making it an ideal tool for both learning and practicing JavaScript, available at JS Challenger.

---

Lantern

We’re slowly getting rid of a bunch of things that have moved along with us over the years, and I recently came across what’s left of my original Zork I manuals and floppy disk, which brought back some very fond memories of a much simpler time.

I suspect the Zork lore is known to most Drop readers, but just in case not…

In the late 1970s, a group of MIT students started a project that would become the genre known as interactive fiction. Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling, members of the Dynamic Modeling Group, were inspired by the text-based game Colossal Cave Adventure. They saw potential to push the boundaries of this nascent genre and set out to create a more spiffy and immersive experience. This ambition led to the development of Zork I, a game with rich narrative, complex puzzles, and a parser capable of understanding complete sentences—a significant leap from the two-word command structure of its predecessors.

Zork I was originally written in MDL (also known as Muddle), a programming language that was a descendant of LISP. Developed at MIT, MDL was both flexible and capable enough to manage the game’s intricate world. The language’s capabilities allowed the team to construct a database of roughly 400 objects, simplifying the creation of the game’s many rooms and items.

The game’s parser could understand a vocabulary of about 900 words and 70 actions. Whilt it may not be as capable of groking human input as ChatGPT, it let us humans input sentences like “Take all but rug” and “Open trap door,” which the game would process and respond to with a level of interactivity that was truly unprecedented at that time.

The game’s source code was a mere ~15K lines, and that code let us explore the Great Underground Empire, in all it’s digital, textual majesty. This parser and the underlying technology inspired advancements in natural language processing and even artificial intelligence.

Now, I could just link you to some online places to play the OG Zork I in browser. However, I’d rather link you to Lantern (GH), which uses JavaScript and D3 to let you point/click your way through the adventure. I remember making detailed maps as I went through each room/area, and it’s super cool how the map auto-generates (via nodes on a force-directed graph) as you explore each place.

Hopefully, this provides a bit of fun and further invokes a bit of nostalgia.

Hexcodle

Don’t have time to explore the Great Underground Empire? Then, perhaps, take just a few seconds/minutes to test your RGB hex color acumen over at Hexcodle.

You have five tries to correctly guess the hex code of the color displayed on in the target box. After each guess, your last guess will be displayed in the your guess box. There will be symbols that pop up in the guesses section that indicate the closeness of your guess.

There are multiple difficulty settings and you can also choose to use decimal RGB codes instead of hexadecimal values.

This is a pretty fun exercise that will also help you learn or reinforce some color theory concepts (if you play it deliberately enough).

JS Challenger

You don’t need an epic weekend project to get better at coding. Every so often, all you require is a mere challenge. JS Challenger helps you learn JavaScript by solving coding exercises in a fun environment. There is a range of levels, from novice to expert, and you can even pick a specific topic area to explore.

The section header shows a scenario where the existing code adds an eventListener for a click event on a variable buttonElem. It expects buttonElem to be the button element in the example UI. But, that element is not selected yet. To solve the puzzle, assign the button element to the variable buttonElem.

These bite-sized challenges are great as mini-coding katas (since we can all use some practice).

FIN

Remember, you can follow and interact with the full text of The Daily Drop’s free posts on Mastodon via @dailydrop.hrbrmstr.dev@dailydrop.hrbrmstr.dev ☮️