Grues in Comic — A Zork × Comic Chat Mashup
Solo builder (side project)
A public beta that replays Zork I's parser-driven text adventure as Comic Chat-style comic panels — two 1980s/90s Microsoft open-source releases fused into one browser game via an independent intermediate representation (IR).
Sparked by two unrelated Microsoft open-source releases: Zork, the 1980s text adventure, and Comic Chat, a 1990s IRC client with a live comic-panel renderer. Zork’s parser-driven gameplay stays intact; only its text-wall output gets replaced with Comic Chat’s automatically arranged character poses and speech bubbles.
Rather than porting either original’s code directly (ZIL and old C++ don’t run in a browser), the project extracts each original’s behavior into an independent layer: an importer parses Zork I’s ZIL source into an AST, an intermediate representation (IR) captures the game logic independent of any runtime, and a TypeScript engine executes that IR — reproducing world state, parsing, combat, and save/load. Engine output feeds a Comic Chat-style renderer, with panel layout, poses, and speech-bubble rules ported from the original C++ source. A frotz-generated walkthrough serves as a reference dataset for line-by-line fidelity checks, now locked in as a regression test covering a full playthrough to the game’s ending.
Built entirely through AI-agent pair-programming — no code written by hand. Public beta live now; the repository stays private until a 1.0 tag alongside the site’s public launch.
