Ascent is a contemporary remix of the classic text adventure Adventure 2.5 / Open Adventure ideated and created by Nathan Pitman as an opportunity to explore what's possible with modern AI led development and a healthy dose of childhood nostalgia.
Ascent flips the core gameplay: instead of descending and exploring a cave from the surface downward, Ascent focuses on escaping from a complex cave network to the surface.
This is an original game in terms of code and game design, but it draws inspiration from the cave structure, objects, and descriptions found in the historical Adventure text-adventure — Open Adventure’s port of Adventure 2.5.
Ascent has been prompted using ChatGPT and Replit on an Apple iPad Air.
This project takes inspiration from:
- Open Adventure — a modern C forward-port of the Adventure 2.5 codebase originally developed by Will Crowther and Don Woods, updated and maintained by Eric S. Raymond and contributors. oai_citation:1‡LibreGameWiki
While this project does not reuse code from the Open Adventure repository, it references and reimagines the cave structure and object descriptions that have been historically part of the Adventure lineage.
This project is released under the 2-Clause BSD License.
Based on the Open Adventure project (forward-port of Adventure 2.5, originally by Will Crowther & Don Woods, modernized by Eric S. Raymond et al.).
This project was inspired by:
- Open Adventure – forward-port of Adventure 2.5 (1995) under the 2-Clause BSD License. oai_citation:2‡LibreGameWiki
If you find bugs, would like to contribute, or have questions about this project, please open an issue or contact me via hello@nathanpitman.com.
Enjoy exploring (and escaping) the caves! 🧭