Dungeons and Directories, an exploration game in your file explorer (opens in new tab)

I remember when I was 6 and my dad brought home an Osbourne for me to play with. Just using CPM felt like dungeon diving to this weird world where you might find a loot in the form of a game or something.

I once did something based on the same principle, for a (very-very light) security solution, atop a simple closed-source media appliance that could play from USB Storage.

I made a script on Linux to create a huge directory tree representing every possible sequence of a password of length N. Only one password path through the tree got the viewer to the directory that had the non-kid-safe media files.

The non-security caveat of this was that the appliance seemed to scan the entire filesystem upon mount, which took a long time. (Even though it provided no UI, other than clicking to open directories and media files within them. Maybe the reason for the scan was to report to the mothership what content each user had, though, in this case, I had networking permanently disabled.) At least the huge tree didn't overflow any limit that prevented the appliance from working after an initial delay.

> In the end, the current version of the game create 41,514 directories, 15,2041 files (mostly empty files with messages in their names), and 45,399 links, which makes it rather unplayable for those unfortunate enough to try running it on a mechanical hard drive.

https://github.com/wheybags/DungeonsAndDirectories/blob/mast...

Be warned if you're not using an SSD!

Many years ago I wrote a tamagochi like virtual pet called "Virus" which lived as "name.virus" file in a folder and you could feed it text files with a ".food" extension. Based on its DNA (random strings inside the".virus"file) it liked certain words more or less and had to eat quite a few files when it was Hungry

It also left ".poop" files in the folder you had to clean up in order for it to stay healthy. Also added mating and offsprings which would fork the process so each would "live" their own life

System 7 used to have a 99 level limit on nested folders. as bored teens, we'd do stupid things like nest folders to that 99 deep limit. in the bottom folder, create an apple script file that would force the user to okay/cancel a silly comment. "Click Okay/Accept If you agree dylan604 is the greatest" kind of stupid. Clicking cancel would do nothing, so that you had to click okay to continue. We'd then make this as a startup item. We'd then use an app to make the apple script file hidden, then go up a folder to make the folder hidden, go up a level and make the folder hidden, x99 kind of thing. i can't remember if there was something about the folders being hidden that prevented just nuking the stack from the upper level, or if it really was that simple to clear.

There was a game "Virus: The Game" (1997) on PC which takes place in your file system.

Minor nitpick: Why are people still insisting on calling macOS "OSX"? It hasn't been "Mac OS X" for quite some time now.

Creating these folder crawling games was great, until you get to the end, and the folder paths become too large and files and folders start disappearing.. and you learn about windows folder limits. Ah, fun times..

Btw, that was 20 years ago.

Does anyone know of the name of the text adventure game that featured a reality where you are inside a UNIXy shell terminal?

Been looking around for awhile so figured this would be a good place to ask.

https://github.com/ChrisRx/dungeonfs Here's a pretty cool take using Linux

Ah… I think I vaguely remember a similar older program that would (optionally, of course!) as a funny option delete the files when you “defeated” them.

Strange they used shortcuts on Windows, as Windows has had links since Vista:

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2016/12/02/symlin...

Either this is because it's not at all well known, or because they think some users will be on XP. (Which would be strange)

Is there an easy way to remove all the generated files?

the thing should run out a VB6 script embedded in a .xlsx spreadsheet...

Then you could have a portable game to bring into any enterprise office environment

This is very cool.

Minor point: Creativity doesn't need a lot of tech.

Interesting idea. Horrible copy. I didn't get much past the first room, where my "eyes perked up" at seeing something shiny. A text adventure, among other things, has to be written well.