Spaceship! is a text adventure built by the collective hivemind of The Guardian gamesblog's community. You remember text adventures, of course; they're those brilliant interactive fiction stories that usually end with you cornered by a dagger-wielding, angry gnome in a dark underground passageway, and a whole bunch of syntax errors scrolling up the screen.

You thought they were amazing? This one's better, I promise. Why? Because we're a bunch of schmoes who've never done anything quite like this before, but we want to see what it's like to make a game rather than just play one.

In our little experiment, you play the role of the Captain of a working ship. While the crew's on holiday, you're catching up on some well-earned shut-eye when everything goes horribly wrong. You've got to fix the ship, or you're gonna die. How's that for motivation?

We're building Spaceship! by Wiki, and we're looking for people who'd like to join us on that ride. A few things you might like to know:

• We're complete programming novices, but we're using super-easy programming language Inform7 to build our little opus
• Anyone can join in; we're particularly looking for people to play the demo and tell us what's wrong with it
• Fancy tring your dab hand at coding? Head to the Coders page for more information!
• Don't have a lot of spare time but like the idea of getting mucky? No problem, we've got loads of absolutely essential creative tasks for proto-Designers and Writers that will take under 5 mintues to complete. Check out Quick Help for weekly updates...
• We meet via Google Talk every Monday at 5pm. If you'd like to listen in, and even add your tuppence, send an email to guardian +at+ gmail +dot+ com and we'll let you into our club