Alice in the Park – Fairytale program
This is a story-based program—a fairy tale, of sorts. It’s about Alice—much like Alice in Wonderland, but in this version, she’s in a park. It’s not a book, but a computer program built using Visual Basic (specifically, the modern version, VB.NET). It features beautiful, retro-style illustrations reminiscent of the classic Sierra adventure games for the IBM PC, accompanied by a narrative that follows Alice’s journey.
And her journey takes her quite far. What’s presented here is the beginning of the story—a complete cycle, if you will. It starts with "Alice in the Park," which serves as the entry point. From there, you reach a crossroads: Alice can choose to head toward an ant village or a valley of mushrooms. These would be new, distinct story modules—though they haven’t been created yet. The transition leads to the story’s conclusion—another separate module—where you can choose one of three possible endings.
The experience involves reading the narrative and viewing the accompanying illustrations. It uses a window-based interface, where each module appears as an individual window, appearing one after another. Currently, all paths lead to the story’s conclusion. Within a given module, there may be multiple windows—for instance, a prompt asking where to go next, followed by a window revealing the outcome of that choice.
At its core, it’s simply a story—ideally, an endless one, with Alice constantly on the move. In theory, there should be various points where the story could conclude, but for now, the narrative is quite short: it begins with the "Alice in the Park" module, includes one transitional module, and ends with the story’s conclusion.
Alice in Wonderland is my favorite fairy tale; it’s so unusual, and so many fascinating things happen within it. Naturally, I wanted to create my own take on it—my own version, Alice in the Park. Perhaps she simply fell asleep and drifted into a world of dreams. It’s like a forest. Or a park. And that’s where the story begins—an entry point into a dream, into a narrative.
I’m continuing to write the story as I go. It’s a simple tale, with various branching paths—all of which, in theory, need to be fleshed out. Let’s say there are two main branches; for the sake of simplicity, they eventually converge back into a single point. Right now, I’m focusing on the "mushroom valley" path—though it’s actually an autumn field that Alice walks through for a long time, before eventually reaching the mushrooms. Then comes the choice: do you head toward the ants, or toward the mushroom valley?
The project consists of images and text—that’s the core of it—all structured as a computer program. The program has a general framework, designed to be expandable later on. I’ve already written the section where Alice is in the field, so I need to build that module, as well as a transition module that leads from the field to the next location.
Everything here has a fairy-tale quality; it’s like a dream. Alice walks through an autumn forest, observing her surroundings, while you read the story—which is now presented in the form of a program. It’s a modular structure, with all the parts interconnected to form the narrative.
For now, the story begins with Alice suddenly finding herself in this autumn forest, walking along a path—because there’s nothing else here, just a well-laid path surrounded by autumn leaves. Further on, she encounters ants and interacts with them, along with various other creatures.
Eventually, she reaches a signpost, which marks the end of the story. While it might seem like you have a choice of where to go, the current version leads directly to one of three possible conclusions—each a little story in itself. For instance, Alice might wake up in a park, with a book in her hands.
Dima Link is making retro videogames, apps, a little of music, write stories, and some retro more.
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