I made a game years ago that I still think turned out really neat. It's a text adventure game, play time of 30 minutes to 2 hours. Comedic, nothing scary or lewd or anything. It's on this website: https://askmeaboutlo0m.github.io/adventure/

I've been kinda thinking of writing up some stuff about it. The whole game basically came out of my frustrations of text adventures and thinking that I could do it better. And I think I did, at least for the kind of game I wanted to make.

The whole parser-based text adventure genre still seems so stuck in old ways to me. They got all these world simulation mechanics that made sense for the kind of game Zork was, but really aren't conducive to what you'd want in an adventure game. Like, it's neat that you can put a note into a wallet inside a pocket of a coat and the player can manipulate all of those nested containers, but how is that fun? Sure, your parser can distinguish looking at, into, behind, under and above a wardrobe, but how does that make for good puzzles? And the ability to detect if the user has typed in a grammatically incorrect sentence is cool tech, but just leads to so much phrase guessing.

I went into the design from the future, taking modern, post-Monkey-Island graphical adventure mechanics and removing the graphics. And I think the result is a much friendlier kind of game, considering how many people played and finished it without getting into fights with the parser, with plenty of extra text for incorrect or useless actions that make exploring fun. And that's despite how much simpler it is than what an 80s Infocom game gives you. But turns out if you don't have all those "superfluous" mechanics, you can get away with something that'll mostly just do what you mean. And of course going by the core assumption that the player is actually trying to play the game and entering sensible inputs, rather than trying to parse arbitrary English text.

I dunno, it could also be that I've been looking in the wrong places. Or maybe interactive fiction doesn't want to be about lateral thinking puzzles at the core.

Maybe I'll write an article about this one of these days and dig out the Perl script spiderbaby that generates most of the content. Anyway, play the game.

#gamedev #interactivefiction #if