FactsAreUseless posted:

What makes a good text adventure vs. a bad one? What do you enjoy doing in a text adventure? I haven't really played any.

Vlad the Retailer posted:

Galatea?

Highblood posted:

Are there any games that fit more into the RPG genre? I'm thinking like a MUD except singleplayer. I've always liked MUDs but they are all severely lacking in story, usually depending on player interaction for actual fun. So any text adventures with stats and equipment and what not?

Wolpertinger posted:

.

SimonChris posted:

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 .

SimonChris posted:

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.

SimonChris posted:

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 presentations and atmosphere are top-notch.

Milky Moor posted:

Milky Moor posted:

This made me curious and so I actually decided to go and find out about the author's background.

He's apparently a television writer. I say apparently because there's no credits to his name and the most concrete information I can find is that he writes pilots for television. He's got four books on Goodreads, but they're all his Choice Of games.

I did kind of hope it was a particularly earnest kid.

Milky Moor posted:

Yeah.

Somehow, this has reminded me though, that you can set your own theme song in Heroes Rise (seriously, the trilogy is big on personal vanity customisation) and one of the options is My Heart Will Go On. I don't know why, but it's there. Needless to say, I picked it and kept thinking of this particular cover whenever my hero was doing something Cool.

Lord Windy posted:

I'm writing it up. Hopefully it will be ready tomorrow/day after. The example code was small, and the documentation didn't do a good job explaining how certain things happen. So I did a heap of playing around to get to grips with how Tale loads rooms/npcs/actors. It isn't necessary to know that to code with Tale well, but I wanted to be able to say how things work instead of leave it at 'here be dragons".

John F Bennett posted:

edit: For those who want to create a text adventure but don't want to do programming, there is also Adrift. I have used it years ago and found it fun to create something with it.

Potsticker posted:

Well, that answers my question from earlier.

potatocubed posted:

I'm pretty certain I've defended Inform's documentation here before, but now I've gone back to actually using it I've changed my mind.

For example, here's my current situation and the solution I've come up with:

I want the player to be able to stand in the bathroom and fill a bucket with water from the taps. The command is 'FILL BUCKET WITH WATER'.

The bucket's all set up. Standard container, works just fine.

'Filling with' is also set up as a new verb. Again, works just fine.

But you can't fill the bucket with water, because nothing called 'water' exists anywhere in the world, so when you type the command Inform just rejects it out of hand. This is important, because it does so before it checks the filling with rules so I can't even intercept it and create my desired end result. You can check this by running your story in Inform and typing RULES ON as a special command. Trying to interact with things that aren't present doesn't trigger any rules at all -- it just straight fails.

So I make an item called 'some water' and stash it Nowhere. Turns out that Inform also rejects noun-oriented commands out of hand if the object isn't in the same location.

So I put the water in the bathroom. Now you can fill the bucket with it, but you can also see it in room item listings.

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.

So I spend an hour last night loving around with rulebooks, trying to create an item which exists only as a placeholder name so the god drat interaction rules will fire. No joy.

Then today, I hit upon the answer!

While the player is in the bathroom, Inform treats any reference to the word "water" as "taps". The taps are scenery already, and trying to fill the bucket with them triggers the filling with rules -- so I can intercept that call and move the water object into the bucket. This also means that FILL BUCKET WITH TAPS will also fill the bucket with water, which is a very minor side benefit of this arcane setup.

I'm sure there's a better way of doing this, probably using rulebooks somehow, but hosed if I know what it is.

Megazver posted:

This year's XYZZY finalists.

Milky Moor posted:

Eh, it depends. I can't say something like Choice of Robots isn't amazing IF with a straight face. However, the purist in me does think there should be a separation between parser IF and CYOA IF.

Now, something that comes from the Twine arena? Like the stuff by Porpentine, like Cyberqueen? The stuff that people tell me demonstrates how great Twine can be? Then we can start talking about things that aren't really IF.

If edgy grotesque pornography and repetitive scenes of vomiting, urinating or making GBS threads yourself isn't your cup of tea, don't click the link. 4/5 stars on IFDB, called "a masterpiece" with "excellent writing" with no choices that actually change things but that's okay because it is "deconstructing" the "power fantasy".

Yeah. When I think IF, I definitely think 'power fantasy'. I can't help but read a lot of Twine things which are - sort of like Sergi's Heroes Rise stuff - made by people who don't really know the history of the medium, which I know sounds horribly elitist of me. But I'm also yet to play a Twine game I'd call truly great, too, because I think the 'click on hyperlinks with no idea what moves forward or what leads into a loop' mechanic is loving terrible.

Megazver posted:

Twine is, like, fine. It lowers the bar on who can submit something but that's, like, also fine. The poo poo will get flushed down the drain, anyway, and we'll get an extra couple of good games out of it. If you only want parser, just play the games made on parser platforms. Last year's Twine-based Birdland placed fourth in the Comp and won a bunch of XYZZYs and I thought it was fantastic.

Porcupine's schtick is creating weird worldbuilding through evocative imagery. Not every game works for me - I am not a big fan of oh-so-edgy mood pieces either - but I did enjoy With Those We Love Alive and Ruiness, for example. I think you might like Ultra Business Tycoon III. It's pretty game-y and it's amusing and it has puzzles, even though it's a Twine game.

Personally I prefer the kind of limited parser games CEJ Pacian and Chandler Groover make. It's a promising direction for IF to head in.

Megazver posted:

Aaron Reed's books about learning Inform is pretty good.

Lichtenstein posted:

I've been on a bit of an Inkle binge and am craving good CYOA recommendations!

I tried a few Choice Of demos, but they left a bit of a meh impression. I don't really know how to properly phrase my concerns, but they felt more like a dating sim (with dating substituted for given game's topic) than a cool story/fun game.

potatocubed posted:

I'm a huge fan of Choice of the Deathless. And the Kindle books it's based on. (Max Gladstone, if you're interested.)

In a more traditional IF vein, I also love Counterfeit Monkey.

corn in the bible posted:

parsers own and are the best, parsers 4 lyfe

corn in the bible posted:

who said it was ironic