Author:

• Name: Jason Orendorff
  Location: US - United States of America (United States)

To build:

    make

To use:

    ./jason

Judges’ remarks:

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

The really amazing part of this is that it’s a text adventure, and there’s not a single word in the source that isn’t a C keyword or function name, being used as such.

The interface isn’t very tolerant of errors, but you can’t really expect that from something this small.

Of particular interest: Go ahead, run it through the preprocessor. You still won’t see the words that are used in the game.

If you run it through a beautifier you might cause a crash as most of the whitespace is significant. Also, if you attempt to change one character identifiers to longer names expect problems. Even swapping the Y and Z can cause problems. Go ahead, try it! :-)

Author’s remarks:

TED Shroyer came up with the idea that made it possible to hide all the text. Thanks, TED. You won. :)

    cc -o jason jason.c
    ./jason
    you are in a maze of twisty little passages
    caves lead:  left forward back
    you see
       a lamp
    > _

This program is a rather nostalgic little labyrinth game. Start out by typing “get lamp”, then use the direction words “left”, “right”, “forward”, and “back” to explore the caves. Note that these words can refer to different passages depending on which way you’re facing. “back” always takes you back the way you came. Type “quit” to quit.

The maze is randomly generated each time you play. The algorithm ensures that you start at least 6 hops away from the exit. All passages are two-way.

(There is a trick, well-known among Adventure game fans, to keeping one’s bearings in games like this. Unless you know the trick, it can be very difficult to find your way around. Try it out first; I’ll give away the secret at the bottom of this document.)

The goal is to collect 8 treasures (plus the lamp) and escape into the sunlight - or moonlight, as the case may be. After a few minutes, the lamp runs out of oil, and things become perilous.

If you manage to escape, you score 50 points for your hide, 50 points per item, and bonus points for speed.

Why I think this program is obfuscated:

• 70% more # symbols than the average entry.

• Where are all the messages? The game is downright chatty for only having two string literals ("%d \n" and "Y\n : ! ,.?>").

• There is exactly one loop in the program, a for loop, and it is clearly the product of a deranged mind. Running the preprocessor only makes it worse.

• Microsoft Visual C++ won’t even compile this program, even though it is plain ANSI C (innocent look) and limits itself to the most standard and portable of the standard library facilities.

• Most of the whitespace is significant, so attempts to beautify it can easily lead to segmentation faults.

• Attempts to replace the one-character identifiers with longer, more meaningful names will likewise cause problems. In fact, simply changing all the Ys to Zs and vice versa results in some unexpected side effects.

When all warnings are enabled, some compilers express the desire to see a few more parentheses. I respectfully submit that there are plenty of parentheses in the program (370 in all.) Besides, any more would put me over the size limit. gcc also generates a warning about some calculations not being used. Having just spent 19 hours staring at this program, sweating over every character, I swear gcc is wrong.

The program is formatted as a poem, to make it more readable. I find the plaintive chorus “B? B?” particularly poignant. Also, smiley faces are formatted flush left. (If you don’t find the game entertaining, see if you can find

    the fish scales              Q)++j<
    the shooting star         -~- ~ -~i +

in the source code.)

GAME STRATEGY

The trick, of course, is to drop items in empty rooms to mark them. That way you usually know if you’re in a room you’ve seen before. It greatly aids mapping.

Primary files

• jason.c - entry source code
• Makefile - entry Makefile
• jason.orig.c - original source code

Secondary files

• 2001_jason.tar.bz2 - download entry tarball
• README.md - markdown source for this web page
• .entry.json - entry summary and manifest in JSON
• .gitignore - list of files that should not be committed under git
• .path - directory path from top level directory
• index.html - this web page

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