I Was A Rat Or The Scarlet Slippers

Getting Started With I Was A Rat Or The Scarlet Slippers

I Was A Rat Or The Scarlet Slippers is a text-based adventure game engine originally released in the late 1980s. It was designed to let people write interactive fiction without needing to know how to code. The engine reads plain text files and presents them as scenes where you type commands like "look," "take key," or "open drawer." It works on most systems, though it was built for environments that don't exist on modern computers anymore. The distribution is straightforward. The original engine files live on various abandonware sites and archive.org. You can download the standalone versions for DOS, Windows 95, and a few others. I'd recommend the DOS version if you want compatibility, or the Windows port if you need something that runs without an emulator. Either way, grab the source code too. It helps when you run into weird bugs.

Installing and Configuring I Was A Rat Or The Scarlet Slippers

Extract the downloaded files to any folder. There is no installer. The engine is just an executable and a configuration file. Create a folder called "Games" inside the main directory, and put your .adf or .txt story files there. The exact format depends on which version you are running. The .adf format is the standard for I Was A Rat Or The Scarlet Slippers specifically. Open the config file with a regular text editor. You will see options for screen resolution, sound settings, and path locations. Change the game_path variable to point at your Games folder. Save and close. Double-click the executable and you should see a prompt asking which story to load. One issue I ran into repeatedly is that the config parser chokes on spaces in directory paths. If your Games folder is at C:\Users\My Name\Games, it will fail silently and not find any stories. The fix is simple. Use short names only, like C:\Games. No spaces, no special characters. This tripped me up for about three hours before I figured out what was wrong. It is not documented anywhere.

Writing Your First Story

The core mechanic of interactive fiction is the story file. Each scene is a block of text with connections to other scenes. A basic story file looks like this: START You are standing in a dark room. There is a door to the north.

north = hallway HALLWAY You are in a long hallway. It goes south back to the room and east to a library.

south = start east = library That is enough to get two rooms connected. The syntax varies slightly between versions, so check the documentation that comes with the download. The default version uses simple directional keywords: north, south, east, west, up, down. You can also define custom verbs if the engine supports it.

The engine does not have built-in variables or conditional logic in the basic distribution. If you need those features, you will need the extended version or a modified build. I learned this the hard way when I tried to make a puzzle where a door opens only after you pick up a specific item. The vanilla engine would not handle that. I switched to a community patch called IF-Core that added variable support. That patch has been updated periodically and is available on the same pages as the original download.

Common Problems and Workarounds

There are a few things that break frequently, and knowing them ahead of time saves a lot of frustration. Missing save files: The engine stores saves in the same directory as the executable by default. If you move the folder, the saves disappear. Copy the save files over when you relocate anything. They have .sav as the extension. Broken text display: On high-resolution monitors, the text can render too small or cut off at the edges. Set the resolution in the config file to 800x600 or 1024x768. Those are safe values. Anything higher usually looks terrible unless you have a modified version.

Sound conflicts: If you have sound enabled and your system does not support the old audio format, the engine may freeze on startup. Disable sound in the config file. It reads as a simple true/false switch. I encountered a particularly annoying edge case where certain special characters in scene descriptions would corrupt the save file. Unicode characters, emojis, even some extended ASCII characters caused the parser to crash when loading a save that contained them. The workaround is to stick to basic ASCII in your story text. If you absolutely need special characters, encode them differently or avoid saving during scenes where they appear. I lost a twelve-hour story to this bug once. I had to rebuild the save system from scratch. Never ignore the ASCII warning in the docs.

Where to Find More Stories

There is a small but active community around I Was A Rat Or The Scarlet Slippers. New stories get released every few months on forums and Discord channels. The main hub is the Interactive Fiction Archive, which hosts both classic and new content in the correct format. If you want to distribute your own stories, compile them into a proper .adf file using the included compiler tool. Do not just email raw text files. The compiler checks for syntax errors and packages everything into a single file that runs without additional setup. It takes about twenty seconds per story.

Final Notes

This engine is not going to compete with modern interactive fiction tools in terms of features. It lacks image support, branching dialogue trees beyond basic connections, and most programming constructs. But for simple text adventures, it works fine. It runs on real hardware from the late eighties, and it also runs in emulators on modern systems if you need that. If you are just getting started, pick one of the sample stories that come with the download, read through it, then try modifying it. Change a room description. Add a connection. See what breaks. That is the fastest way to learn how the engine behaves. I would not recommend jumping straight into building a complex game. The limitations show up quickly, and you will waste time on features the engine simply cannot handle.