creating text adventures - code heavy?

[noobish hat]

Anyone know anything about the difficulty of creating text adventures? Is there a program that allows you to make them without any coding. Am I right in thinking that Inform is a fairly colloquial form of code for writing interactive fiction? I'd kind of like to get into it, but I'm know nothing about programming (other than horace goes skiing type games in basic) and was confused even by rpg maker.

[JamesS]

Inform 7 is based on natural language, so you describe the game more than coding it. The Inform 7 site has a good overview and a load of examples. Download the app and have a look at the example files.

When I was younger, I loved making text adventures. I used Graphic Adventure Creator on the C64 at first, then wrote my own system on the Amiga using AMOS that let me do games that were more like Magnetic Scrolls ones, with full screen graphics and a more advanced parser than GAC.

[topper]

Magnetic Scrolls! You win the "great blast from the past" award.

[Dogg Thang]

I used to write them years ago in BASIC which was really easy though time consuming. Just required a lot of ifs and equals but very little knowhow. I'm not sure it could get easier but there must be ways that are less time consuming. I remember inventories being a particular pain and I don't remember having copy and paste back in those days. Well, if we did, I didn't know about it.

[toythatkills]

http://www.adrift.org.uk/cgi/new/adrift.cgi

I used to love using this software to make text adventures, it sounds like what you want. All the fun and none of the coding. Actually, I think I've got a half finished game somewhere...

I should note that I haven't used this software for a few years so I'm not sure how complex it's gotten, used to be really really easy though.

Bah, it used to be free but it's not now, you can use it for free it seems but your adventure will be limited in size. Definitely worth a look though.

[noobish hat]

Thanks guys, I've been wanting to do a little project or something. I was just playing Photopia, which is weird, and a bit pointless in a japanese-novel kind of way.

[DCharlie]

Although you mention not being that code literate, I'm nearly done with the 3DBuzz 101 XNA/C# tutorial "hello world" Hyperion project walk through and if anyone is even slightly interested in making an adventure game from scratch that will then lead you on to XNA coding i HIGHLY recommend it.

It's all done from a zero coding knowledge base point so it can be a little slow for people with some coding background (there are hours and hours of XVid lectures to go through) but it's all well presented, it's very clear, it cements some fundamental coding ideas in there for you, etc etc.

But yes, it shows you how to make your own Text Adventure engine (though with no graphical output).

[vanpeebles]

Listen to JamesS, I've used inform in the past and its a version of what was used for the Infocom games. There's tons of support for it, loads of examples and its very easy to use. Its designed for text adventures and makes a very good job of it.

[abigsmurf]

I'd imagine it's actually incredibly easy to code an engine from scratch.

Make a giant 3D array. X = X axis on map for room, Y = Y axis, Z = list of objects in the room. object 0 is always a room object, the rest are various types of objects such as monsters, items or traps. Each type of object has a description, any events ('if monster is killed unlock northern door') and custom properties (stats for monsters, what key is needed to unlock a chest etc.).

Or you could use a visual novel engine if you're looking at a more linear game. Onscripter is one that springs to mind.

[JamesS]

Inform 7 is pretty remarkable, as it's a language entirely designed for making text adventures. Building the world is just a case of describing it. Source code in Inform 7 looks like this:

Bob is a person. Bob is in the shop. Bob is wearing a red hat.

The shop is a room with description "This is Bob's shop. The exit is east. Stairs lead down into the basement."

The road is east of the shop. Down from the shop is the basement.

That's enough to build a three room adventure with a couple of objects (Bob and his hat). It gets more code like when you start building puzzles, but even then only barely.

[peeveen]

Wow. I used Inform about 10 years ago and it looked nowt like that. Quite impressive, but presumably there's also some lower-level stuff you can use? I hacked the life out of the parser when I was using it so that all actions could be done by any character, not just the player.

[JamesS]

Yeah, they did a complete rewrite for version 7, so it's all based on natural language. You can still do lower level code too, though (I think you can just embed Inform 6 code if you really need to). Internally, it ends up generating I6 code then compiling it, I think.

It comes with its own IDE now, which is quite neat. It can build maps of your game, and show graphs of the objects and whatnot, and I think there's stuff for testing the game and making sure you cover as many options as possible in test runs.

[Asholay]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the ClickTeam products - The Games Factory / Multimedia Fusion.

They are superbly easy to use if you want to do basic stuff, and yet still offer the ability to do exceptionally complex stuff if you want to, like the arrays and online game stuff.

I've nearly finished my online game lobby for an old game I made, which implements locally hosting a game, 'hosting' a game on a channel on the server, chat function, etc, etc...

http://www.clickteam.com/eng/tgf2.php

To code games, you use a condition based system - i.e. player collides with backdrop: stop player, play sample "boing",etc - you get the idea...

To make good games, all you need is to be able to draw well - so to do a text based adventure would be an absolute walk in the park...!!

[Magnakai]

If you liked the Magnetic Scrolls games, then there's a PC games builder that's a little like that called RAGS.

But yeah, Inform 7 is the stuff really. For great examples of modern text adventuring, I (highly) recommend Lost Pig and Violet, which came first place in the annual IF competition in 2007 and 2008 respectively. For something a bit more unusual (more like a semi-interactive work of fiction), Photopia is really very good indeed. I should say that I've enjoyed those three games as much as anything else I've played, graphical or otherwise.

[noobish hat]

Oh my pacman. Had a go on Inform 7, and by christ is it more complicated than it looks.