Five Weeks in a Balloon

TUTORIAL — VERSION 1.0.0 — TRONSOFT INTERACTIVE FICTION ENGINE, CORE 2.3.0

You are Dr. Samuel Ferguson. With Dick Kennedy and your servant Joe you are going to cross Africa from Zanzibar to the Atlantic watershed in a balloon, and you are going to do it without setting foot on the ground between the coast and the desert of Kanem. This page covers everything needed to play.

How to begin

Launch the game from the Tronsoft Games library.
The cover screen offers story narration and region ambience. Both are optional and both are off-by-default for narration, on-by-default for ambience. Nothing plays until you press the button.
Press CAST OFF.
You begin on the terrace of the English mission at Zanzibar. Captain Pennet is waiting with the Society's commission. Type TALK PENNET, or press the TALK button and then his name.

If you would rather not type at all, you never have to. Every command in the game is available as a button. Choose an action, and the CONTEXT band fills with the things that action can be applied to here.

Controls

Movement

COMMAND	EFFECT
N S E W U D	Go north, south, east, west, up or down.
GO NORTH	The same thing spelled out. Compass directions and UP/DOWN are all accepted.
DIRECTIONS band	Shows only the ways out that exist from where you are.

Ordinary actions

COMMAND	EFFECT
LOOK	Describe this place again. Free.
EXAMINE thing	Look closely. `X` is short for it.
SEARCH thing	Go through it. This is how several things in the game are found at all.
READ thing	Read a document. The manifest in the mission stores is worth reading first.
TAKE / DROP thing	Pick up or put down.
USE thing	Apply it. The sextant is used, not examined, when it matters.
OPEN / CLOSE thing	For anything with a lid.
TALK person	Speak to somebody. Talk again for the next thing they have to say; people run out.
WAIT	Let time pass. Safe almost everywhere, and once fatal — you will be told which time.
INVENTORY	What you are carrying. Free.

The eight balloon verbs

These do the work that ordinary adventure verbs cannot. Every one of them is needed more than once, and every one has a button at the right-hand end of the ACTIONS band.

VERB	WHAT IT IS FOR
ASCEND	Warm the hydrogen and climb. The only way out of a tornado, out of Kazeh and out of musket range at Sego.
DESCEND	Let the hydrogen cool and come down — to the surface of a lake, into an emptied village square, or onto flat ground.
ANCHOR	Throw the grapnel. Holds the Victoria still for an observation, or to the ground for an hour's work. Never over a cataract.
JETTISON	Put weight over the side. Needed once, at the moment it is the only thing left.
FILL	Take water aboard. Four places in Africa will give it to you.
SHOOT	Kennedy's rifles. Used on an elephant, a war drum and a company of condors — and refused twice, on purpose.
SIGNAL	Make yourself seen: a ladder trailed across a running man's course, or three men waving at a French patrol.
SEW	A sail-maker's palm and waxed thread. Closes a rent in the silk, and later cuts a smaller balloon out of a larger one.

Information and system

COMMAND	EFFECT
JOURNAL	Everything the expedition has established, in order.
QUESTS	The objectives, complete and outstanding.
ACHIEVEMENTS / STATS	What has been done, and the running counts.
SCORE	Your points out of 150.
HINT	A three-level ladder for wherever you are. The third level is the actual command.
SAVE name / RESTORE name	Keep or return to a position. See below.
TRANSCRIPT	The whole session, with a download button.
RESTART	Begin again at Zanzibar.
HELP	The command list, in the game.

Turn order

The game is turn-based and waits for you. Nothing happens on a timer and nothing happens while you are thinking. Each turn resolves in the same order:

Your command is echoed.
The action is carried out, and what it does is described.
Its consequences follow — an objective completed, points, an achievement, a journal entry.
If you moved, the new place is described last.

Information commands are free. LOOK, EXAMINE, INVENTORY, JOURNAL, QUESTS, ACHIEVEMENTS, STATS, SCORE, HINT, SAVE, RESTORE, TRANSCRIPT and HELP do not consume a turn and never cost water. You can read the whole world without paying for it.

Movement across Africa

20 places in 5 regions:

REGION	PLACES
I. The Coast of Zanzibar	Zanzibar, Mission Stores, Koumbeni Island, The Car
II. Over Eastern Africa	Mrima Coast, Mount Duthumi, Ugogo, Kazeh
III. The Great Lake and the Nile	Lake Ukerewe, Nile Sources, Taliba Village, Gondokoro
IV. Lake Tchad and the Desert	Condor Heights, Lake Tchad, Kanem, Tuareg Plain
V. The Niger and the Senegal	Sego, Falls of Guina, Above the Falls, Medina

The wind on this coast sets west from March, and it does not blow back. Region boundaries are one-way. Each is announced in the room text before you cross it — “the wind that takes you there will not bring you back” means what it says. Finish what you want to finish in a region before you leave it.

The chart panel on the right shows the whole itinerary, which places you have entered, and the water in the tanks.

Water: the only resource

The Victoria has no ballast economy. She rises when a platinum coil warms her hydrogen and falls when it cools, and she throws away neither gas nor sand. The battery that drives the coil decomposes water, and the crew drink from the same tanks.

The tanks hold 12 measures.
Water is spent at fixed points in the story — a particular climb, a particular escape — and never by the turn. Exploring, reading, talking and asking for hints are free.
Four places in Africa will refill them: the mission cistern at Zanzibar, Lake Ukerewe, Lake Tchad, and a half-choked well in Kanem.
A departure that would cost more water than you have is refused, with an explanation. It is never allowed to strand you.

Scoring

150 points:

OBJECTIVE	POINTS
Fit Out the Victoria	15 points
Ride Out the Tornado	15 points
The Anchor and the Elephant	10 points (optional)
Leave Kazeh a God	15 points
The Sources of the Nile	15 points
The Tree of Death	15 points
The Fight in the Netting	15 points
Recover Joe	15 points
The Left Bank of the Senegal	15 points
Four keepsakes	5 points each, 20 in all

The keepsakes are optional and are in four different regions. Because the boundaries are one-way, a keepsake left behind is a keepsake lost — it costs points, and nothing else. The game remains completable.

Winning

You win by reaching the left bank of the Senegal below the falls of Guina and making yourself known to the French post at Medina. Full completion is 150 of 150 in 66 moves; the direct route gets there with 120 in 51.

Losing

There are exactly four decisions in the game that will kill the expedition, and every one of them is described as dangerous in the room text before you can make it. Nothing else in the game is fatal, and there is no way to render the game unwinnable — no object can be permanently lost, no door can be permanently shut, and every route was tested by resuming from a save at every fourth move of the walkthrough.

If the expedition does end, the game says so and tells you what to do: RESTORE to return to your last save, or RESTART to begin again at Zanzibar. There is no undo.

Saving and restarting

SAVE keeps a position called quick. SAVE kazeh keeps one called kazeh. Any number of names.
RESTORE or RESTORE kazeh returns to one.
The SAVE MANAGER button lists every save with its place, score and move count, and can restore or delete each one.
Saves live in this browser only, under the key tronsoft_tife_five_weeks_in_a_balloon_save. Nothing is sent anywhere. Clearing your browser's site data will remove them.
RESTART begins again immediately. It does not consume a turn and it does not touch your saves.

Accessibility

The ACCESSIBILITY button in the footer offers six profiles — standard, low vision, blind / screen reader, hard of hearing, motor assistance and cognitive support — and every individual setting can be changed after choosing one: text size, high contrast, larger controls, captions, visual sound indicators, reduced typing, simplified layout, reduced motion and text-to-speech narration. Settings are kept on this device.

All region ambience is captioned. The whole voyage is completable with sound and narration switched off, and every command can be issued from a button or from the keyboard alone.