Planedrift – Play Infocom games in the browser

Hey HN, recently I wrote an open-source Z-machine (https://github.com/techbelly/elm-zmachine) to support a course I'm teaching about interpreters and functional programming. Once I'd done that, I just had to make my own client.

Partly, I wanted to enjoy playing the games I played when I was a kid. Partly, I just wanted to give my Z-machine a real test and see what kind of things I could build with access to the internals of the VM.

Those old games could be super-frustrating. Especially the ones that teach you how to play by killing you over and over again - looking at you, Infidel. And while I used to sit and play for hours at a time, these days I only have a few minutes here and there.

So, in Planedrift, every time you move, the full transcript and game state are snapshotted to localStorage. You can close the tab mid-game and come back to exactly where you were or use the history list to jump back in time. The idea is to make it easy to pick up a game for ten minutes and then put it down again.

I'm no designer, and I've done my best to make it pleasant to look at.

Behind the scenes it's written in Elm - which I know is not everyone's first choice, but it works for me! It only supports .z3 files at the minute, and .z5 is in progress. I’ve bundled the three publicly available Zorks, but you can bring your own .z3 file from one of the online archives.

I'm thinking of adding more comprehensive note taking, maybe auto-mapping, transcript search and I'm playing with some plug-in ideas, and of course, dark mode! What do you think? What features should I prioritize?

Ultimately, I hope you play some old Infocom games with Planedrift and enjoy it.