Text Adventures - When authors pretend to be programmers and visa versa

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Text Adventures - When authors pretend to be programmers and visa versa

SimonChris: Apr 24, 2008; The Baron's daughter is missing, and you are the man to find her. No problem. With your inexhaustible arsenal of hard-boiled similes, there is nothing you can't handle.; Grimey Drawer

Cool, a text adventure thread! I've written a few games myself. I still have a bunch of iTunes promo codes for PataNoir and Death off the Cuff, so if anyone wants a free copy of the iOS versions, just PM me for a code

# ¿ Feb 9, 2016 19:43

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 15, 2024 11:21

SimonChris: Apr 24, 2008; The Baron's daughter is missing, and you are the man to find her. No problem. With your inexhaustible arsenal of hard-boiled similes, there is nothing you can't handle.; Grimey Drawer

Twerkteam Pizza posted:

Can we be friends.

Also what platform do you write with?

Sure, friend

. My games are all written in Inform, except for AlethiCorp, which is a web game using ASP.NET MVC.

As for the mobile apps, they are made by wrapping the Inform games in native code, using Andrew Plotkin's iOSGlulxe for the iOS apps and this Android code for the Android apps. I'm also working on a windows desktop version using WPF. I hope to get that up on Steam when it's done.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2016 09:16

SimonChris: Apr 24, 2008; The Baron's daughter is missing, and you are the man to find her. No problem. With your inexhaustible arsenal of hard-boiled similes, there is nothing you can't handle.; Grimey Drawer

I also highly recommend trying out Device 6, which uses a completely unique technique to tell a story using text. I wasn't a big fan of the puzzles, but the presentation and atmosphere are top-notch.

SimonChris fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Feb 10, 2016

# ¿ Feb 10, 2016 22:52

SimonChris: Apr 24, 2008; The Baron's daughter is missing, and you are the man to find her. No problem. With your inexhaustible arsenal of hard-boiled similes, there is nothing you can't handle.; Grimey Drawer

Pope Guilty posted:

You'll need DOSBox to run it, since AGT was never updated past 16-bit, but Cosmoserver is a fun oldie. You play as a freelance plumber and programmer trying to log on to his computer, find a fix for his program, and eat something before he passes out. The bulk of the game takes place on a simulated BBS system that is Totally Not Compuserve, though the clock is always running and things happen whether you're there for them or not- so you have to play through a few times, figure out what happens when, and chart the best course through the game.

If you're into simulated environment games, I can also recommend Digital: A Love Story and emily is away.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2016 09:09

SimonChris: Apr 24, 2008; The Baron's daughter is missing, and you are the man to find her. No problem. With your inexhaustible arsenal of hard-boiled similes, there is nothing you can't handle.; Grimey Drawer

Twerkteam Pizza posted:

I will buy them all on steam as soon as you do so friend

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=624095069

You can start by voting for it on Greenlight

. I'm also looking for beta testers, so people can PM me if they're interested.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2016 16:27

SimonChris: Apr 24, 2008; The Baron's daughter is missing, and you are the man to find her. No problem. With your inexhaustible arsenal of hard-boiled similes, there is nothing you can't handle.; Grimey Drawer

Radio K

Speaking of Photopia, Adam Cadre is doing a podcast reviewing the most prominent IF works published since he dropped out of the community nearly 15 years ago.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2016 17:15

SimonChris: Apr 24, 2008; The Baron's daughter is missing, and you are the man to find her. No problem. With your inexhaustible arsenal of hard-boiled similes, there is nothing you can't handle.; Grimey Drawer

potatocubed posted:

So I make it scenery. Which means you can still interact with it - 'X WATER' in the bathroom lets you look at the water - but at least it's not listed so people might not think to do that. Except now it can't move to the bucket because you can't put scenery in a container. You also can't have two objects with the same name, so I can't have water-the-object and water-the-scenery, which would otherwise solve this problem (in conjunction with some instead rules). I could work around this with the printed name instruction, but that produces its own oddities.

You can't have two objects with the same object name, but you can have several objects that can be referred to by the same word. Like this:

"The dummyWater is scenery in the bathroom. Understand "water" as the dummyWater.

The water is a thing.

Instead of filling the bucket with the dummyWater:
remove the dummyWater from play;
now the water is in the bucket."

Since the two waters should never be in scope at the same time, there is no parser ambiguity.

You can also make an object "undescribed", which prevents it from being mentioned without making it scenery, if that helps

SimonChris fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Apr 17, 2016

# ¿ Apr 17, 2016 21:50

SimonChris: Apr 24, 2008; The Baron's daughter is missing, and you are the man to find her. No problem. With your inexhaustible arsenal of hard-boiled similes, there is nothing you can't handle.; Grimey Drawer

http://store.steampowered.com/app/449150/

PataNoir is now available on Steam, featuring an amazing simulated book interface, a never before seen map of the city, and 19 Steam achievements, the achievement of which will lead you through the hidden content in the game!

I believe this is the first parser game to make it to Steam, beating Hadean Lands by several weeks. I have three Steam keys set aside for the first three people who PM's me here to request one.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2016 20:11

SimonChris: Apr 24, 2008; The Baron's daughter is missing, and you are the man to find her. No problem. With your inexhaustible arsenal of hard-boiled similes, there is nothing you can't handle.; Grimey Drawer

Megazver posted:

Very glad for you. This is a good game.

How did you do the interface?

The interface is adapted from the old Textfyre web applications, which you can see in action here: https://textfyre.itch.io/jack-toresal-and-the-secret-letter.

Unfortunately, Silverlight is a dead technology now, but I was able to reuse most of the UI code for a WPF desktop application. This does have the unfortunate side-effect of making the game Windows exclusive, but I thought that was a sacrifice worth making for the sake of the cool book interface. I plan to open-source the WPF code some time in the future.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2016 20:34

SimonChris: Apr 24, 2008; The Baron's daughter is missing, and you are the man to find her. No problem. With your inexhaustible arsenal of hard-boiled similes, there is nothing you can't handle.; Grimey Drawer

hyphz posted:

Intriguing idea, but some things with interaction with NPCs could be tightened up, perhaps?

That's the problem with parser games. There is always more interactions to tighten up.

hyphz posted:

- Likewise, after "do you think you can handle it?", YES gives "that was a rhetorical question", which may be narratively true but..

https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/650542605269229569

This was actually a very popular response, though...

# ¿ Jun 3, 2016 08:25

SimonChris: Apr 24, 2008; The Baron's daughter is missing, and you are the man to find her. No problem. With your inexhaustible arsenal of hard-boiled similes, there is nothing you can't handle.; Grimey Drawer

hyphz posted:

That's fantastic. Anyway, I think it's a great idea, I was just mentioned them in case they were useful.

One other one I found: in Camino's office, >PUT WATER IN COCOON says "the cocoon is just a simile, it can't contain literal things", but the river is also a simile.

Unfortunately, due to the way Inform saves work, I cannot make any changes to the game logic whatsoever without breaking all existing savegames. I am obviously not willing to do that unless there is a very serious bug, so I will just have to make a note of your suggestions until then. If I ever make another Inform game, I will probably implement my own checkpoint based save system.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2016 21:49

SimonChris: Apr 24, 2008; The Baron's daughter is missing, and you are the man to find her. No problem. With your inexhaustible arsenal of hard-boiled similes, there is nothing you can't handle.; Grimey Drawer

wit posted:

This is good to know, haven't seen that mentioned in the two manuals I'm working through. They're well written but do not feel like they were written by coders. Does it have a stack or anything?

Basically, Inform games run on a virtual machine called the Z-Machine or, more commonly today, Andrew Plotkins Glulx VM. In the Inform Settings tab you can select whether your game should compile to Z-Code or Glulx, but most Inform 7 games can't actually fit inside the Z-Code limitations anymore, due to the increasing size of the standard library.

Inform savegames simply dump the contents of virtual memory to a file, so whenever you compile a new version of your game, those memory adresses will no longer have any meaning.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2016 09:11

SimonChris: Apr 24, 2008; The Baron's daughter is missing, and you are the man to find her. No problem. With your inexhaustible arsenal of hard-boiled similes, there is nothing you can't handle.; Grimey Drawer

hyphz posted:

Ugh, that's lame! I quite like Inform but I didn't realise it had that kind of limitation

Inform does allow you to manually read and write information between files, so you can implement your own savegame system, if you like. Depending on the type of the game this might be more or less complicated. In some games, I might be sufficient to store the index of the current Chapter, and maybe some Important Choices the player made.

SimonChris fucked around with this message at 10:27 on Aug 20, 2016

# ¿ Jun 4, 2016 21:23

SimonChris: Apr 24, 2008; The Baron's daughter is missing, and you are the man to find her. No problem. With your inexhaustible arsenal of hard-boiled similes, there is nothing you can't handle.; Grimey Drawer

Fuschia tude posted:

Oh hey, you made PataNoir? We actually played that at the local IF meetup a few months ago.

Cool, what did you think? I'm still not entirely happy with all of the puzzles.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2016 10:27

SimonChris: Apr 24, 2008; The Baron's daughter is missing, and you are the man to find her. No problem. With your inexhaustible arsenal of hard-boiled similes, there is nothing you can't handle.; Grimey Drawer

http://store.steampowered.com/app/726870/Anchorhead/

Anchorhead is coming to Steam on 31 January, with original illustrations.

# ¿ Jan 16, 2018 21:10

SimonChris: Apr 24, 2008; The Baron's daughter is missing, and you are the man to find her. No problem. With your inexhaustible arsenal of hard-boiled similes, there is nothing you can't handle.; Grimey Drawer

https://lparchive.org/Anchorhead/

Yeah, it's this one. You're right that the deal fell through, but I am pretty sure the LP was what inspired the author to have the game illustrated.

# ¿ Jan 16, 2018 21:28

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 15, 2024 11:21

SimonChris: Apr 24, 2008; The Baron's daughter is missing, and you are the man to find her. No problem. With your inexhaustible arsenal of hard-boiled similes, there is nothing you can't handle.; Grimey Drawer

Draxamus posted:

What's the easiest way to go about making a standalone text adventure with a parser? Like let's say I wanted to use Inform to make a game that's playable on Android. You'd need some interpreter app to play the game file. How would I go about making a standalone version (which I guess would have its own interpreter built in)?

https://github.com/SimonChris/AndroidIF

For iOS, you can use Android Plotkin's iOSGlulxe: https://github.com/erkyrath/iosglulxe/wiki/How-to-Turn-Your-Inform-Game-Into-an-iOS-App

Mind, neither of these options are all that easy and will require some basic app development experience.

SimonChris fucked around with this message at 10:16 on May 16, 2018

# ¿ May 16, 2018 08:47

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Text Adventures - When authors pretend to be programmers and visa versa