Checking Your Watch — 1 of 1

"Check Your Watch" by John Timmons

The story headline is "Checking Your Watch for the Time of Day". The story description is "This is an example of one way to create an object such as a wristwatch that will display the time of day to the player simply by examining it."

Release along with the source text and a website.

Use full-length room descriptions, American dialect, the serial comma, and no scoring.

[By default, all games begin at 9:00 AM but we can change that to anytime by doing the typing in something like: The time of day is 2:50 PM.]
When play begins:

say "You have until 9:10 PM to figure out a way to escape the foyer before the torch burns out and leaves you in the dark for all eternity. Check your watch so you know how much time you have.[paragraph break]"

[Here is the watch, worn by the player.]
The watch is worn by the player. The description is "You watch displays [time of day]."

[I included this after rule so that the action of checking the watch doesn't count as a turn.]
After examining the watch:

decrease the time of day by 1 minute.

[This is our starting room that is dark.]
The Foyer is a room. It is dark. "The foyer is barren except for a flaming torch attached to the wall."

[This is our torch located in the Foyer. It is lit to initially provide light in the room.]
A torch is scenery in the Foyer. It is lit.

Instead of taking the torch:

say "Try as you might, the torch is firmly attached to the wall and will not budge an inch."

[Here we check for certain times of day to display messages to the player about the status of the torch.]
At 9:05 AM: say "The torch starts to flicker."

At 9:07 AM: say "The torch sputters and the flame begins to diminish."

At 9:09 AM: say "The last flames of the torch flicker out..."

At 9:10 AM: say "Darkness engulfs you and the realization that this is the end.";

end the game in death.

test me with "z / z / z / z / z / z / z / z / z / z / z".