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Mrs. Pepper's Nasty Secret

"Mrs. Pepper's Nasty Secret" was co-authored by Jim Aikin (that would be me) and TADS guru Eric Eve. It won both the Interactive Short Fiction Competition and the IFBeginnersComp for 2008. The idea behind these competitions was to create games that would introduce new players and novice programmers to interactive fiction. Both the game file and the latest source code are available for download here. Downloads are also available at the Interactive Fiction Archive, but the versions on MusicWords may be slightly newer. The most recent version is 1.04, released on May 18, 2008.

If you're interested in writing your own games in TADS, you can download the source code and be amazed at some of the clever tricks Eric came up with for this game. (My own code is all thumbs.) If new to programming, you may not understand a lot of what's going on here, but if you download the TADS documentation, you'll find a wealth of materials that will help you get started.

The "Mrs. Pepper" story is perhaps not very serious or profound, but we had some fun with it: You play the part of a young teenager whose skateboard has been stolen by Mrs. Pepper, a neighborhood widow who is even less nice than she initially seems (and that's not very nice at all). While retrieving your skateboard, you'll stumble upon a challenge that's a good deal more compelling.

The game is designed in such a way that it can't be made unwinnable. There's only one ending, and it's a happy one, but figuring out how to reach the happy ending may provide a few challenges. The game includes a complete context-sensitive hint system, so it's impossible to get truly stuck.

The game was written in TADS (The Adventure Development System), version 3. This fact is relevant because users of Macintosh and Linux computers will need a separate interpreter program in order to run the software. Windows users can download the .t3 file and an interpreter, or download and run a self-contained .exe file. Interpreters are available from tads.org.

TADS .t3 file

Windows .exe file

Source Code