11 ms·

Skyrim rendered in text

459 points by ellinokon 9y ago

atriches 9y ago
Its time to stop!
bitL 9y ago
I first thought the author used real-time CNN + RNN to generate descriptions of the rendered Skyrim scene and showing only that one to the player.
- duckarmada 9y ago
  Exactly what I was thinking, which sounds like an interesting project in itself.
  - michaelbuckbee 9y ago
    Similar, but I thought maybe they had just pulled the dialogue trees, locations, etc.
hmhrex 9y ago
I'm actually excited to see how this project turns out. I used to play these little text RPGs on my dad's Blackberry, and this kind of reminds me of those. I'd love to see a full game of this.
Rooster61 9y ago
"...an arrow slams into the ground less than an inch from your knee." Nice touch there :)
- denisw 9y ago
  Context for those who haven‘t played Skyrim: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-took-an-arrow-in-the-knee http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-took-an-arrow-in-the-knee
le-mark 9y ago
And during that project, I realized that text stories are fractal. Unlinke in videogames (which need a steady update method), in text we don’t actually need to stick to a single level of abstraction. Very cool, this is one of the most original things I've read about this year. The example he gives is different levels of commands and details during combat. Zelda 2 (I think) had a similar thing going from map view to side view for combat. But this is for text adventures. Mind blowing really.
- filiph 9y ago
  Thanks! Author here. I think quite a few videogames have different levels. For example, I remember an old 1990s game called Wargasm where you could both be the general and the soldier. It was a lot of fun. Most videogames don't go there, though, because it's more straightforward to use the game at a single "level". Even if they do have multiple levels, though, I don't think they ever go with more than 2 or 3. That would be just too confusing. In text, though, this is natural. Even in non-interactive books, you have things like "Conan wants revenge > Conan is on his way to Stygia > Conan meets cobras > Conan is being attacked by the King Cobra > King Cobra's attack goes above Conan's head > Conan thrusts sword upward".
  - phlakaton 9y ago
    I think it's relatively common to the RPG genre to have multiple levels going on in a game. Minigames are a hallowed feature of most Final Fantasy installments, for example. Crafting might also be considered somewhat of a game. _Fractal_ design, though, implies some element of self-similarity between the levels – and that definitely seems like something more rare!
  - subwayclub 9y ago
    Scope variance is actually really common in mobile games as well as RPGs and simulation. All of them share the same kind of design goal of bending time to fit a certain play session or inner/outer game loop length. More "immersive" games ignore the logistical problems of extreme detail and offer tools like time compression, but designing for accessibility bends things the other way, towards providing a spliced-up timeline where events don't have to happen in any particular order apart from one that builds up a sensible narrative. Hence you have the existence of things like equipment screens that can be popped up mid-battle, pausing everything to let you think about how to divide up loot. And the energy model in mobile F2P, which doesn't make a lick of sense but enforces limited session length and progression. You can take this even further when you think about power up items in pretty much any game.
haspok 9y ago
How old is the author I wonder? Did he not play Wizardry or any other similar game back in the 80s/90s, which implemented exactly this kind of gameplay? Wizardry 7 had so much - good quality - text in it (probably enough to fill a book) that it significantly accelerated my English learning at the time as a non-native English speaker. And the fighting system was very similar to what the author arrived at in the end. I for one would be very happy to see the return of this style of gaming - I haven't played computer games for so long, mostly because they are just all the same, 3D action and no substance. I would gladly read / interact with fantasy fiction like this though.
- pjc50 9y ago
  The author describes themselves as a "gamebook enthusiast" and mentions IFCOMP, so they're very much operating within the knowledge of the genre. What the article really is is a deconstruction, presented as to a novice; he's asking what interactional elements and primitives are required of both video-action and text-interactive games, in order to produce an action-IF game.
- jamesrcole 9y ago
  > I haven't played computer games for so long, mostly because they are just all the same, 3D action and no substance If that's your opinion of them then I don't think you've investigated them much, and are just jumping to conclusions.
  - PostOnce 9y ago
    I still play all the time and there's some truth to them all being the same. They get more and more polished on a UI level, and more realistic looking, but remain static mechanically. For example, Skyrim doesn't do much mechanically that Ultima Underworld didn't. Ultima proper did all of that from a different perspective for a long while before that, too. The Witcher 3 is my absolute favorite RPG at least since Skyrim and probably supercedes it, but again, it's just super polished, it doesn't do much that's really new, that I haven't seen before in an RPG or other game. You pick speech options from dialogue trees, loot dead things, and fetch quest items, but you're in a cardboard world. The monsters just wait for you to come slaughter them, they're set-pieces whose purpose is to sit there until you arrive, then bite you. The world reacts largely in a single specific way: you win. Actually, I thing modern RPGs have regressed, Ultima VI's keyword-based dialogue was better than our modern dialogue trees. You could speak in natural language about a variety of topics, some of which were hinted at by the NPC with highlighted words, and others you had to figure out for yourself. (you could just type "troll" or you could type "What can you tell me about the troll?" or "I have seen a troll, and need advice, can you help?", it was more fun and interactive) I'm hyped for Underworld Ascendant, because just maybe they'll break some new ground for a change. "A living ecosystem", but with people who can (and have) backed up that claim. I don't see much else on the horizon -- the indies are our only hopes! AAA can't afford to lose now, so it's all cookie cutter sequels there, only the indies can afford the risk. I think a huge, huge part of the problem is that games cost so much and carry so much risk now. Ultima Underworld got a full sequel _ELEVEN MONTHS LATER_. You could move faster and try more then, because art didn't cost so much, there was no motion capture, no voice acting, it was cheap to make a game. If a sequel flops now you can't just try again, you lost $75,000,000 dollars and are now bankrupt. Anyway, here's a link to a free, breathtakingly good book on the history of CRPGs from the 70s through today: https://crpgbook.wordpress.com/ https://crpgbook.wordpress.com/
lawlessone 9y ago
I wonder could to do this backwards? Create a system knows the setting/contexts etc of a text adventure game and renders a scene? edit: perhaps authors could add other tags/meta the user would not see but would add to the description
- LoSboccacc 9y ago
  I did some experimentation there - coded a turn based combat sistem and bolted on a real time combat. It's a magnitude easier than what proposed here, because you can code statefulness on the combat turns and that'll render quite fine and coherently. The only glitch that I had was at target switch (it's a 4x space themed coffee breaker) where you can see the ship smapping to the new target and that's it - but the nature if the turn sytem means I can easily code in a turn skip on target chane and tween the rotation. but if you want a prime example, the dwarf fortress visualizers take that concept to an incredible heights.
  - amaranth 9y ago
    Diablo started out as a turn-based game and to change it to real time it seems like they basically just made the turns advance automatically via a game state tick call (20 times a second or whatever) and tweaked how long actions took so it looked like the player and world were acting simultaneously. https://www.diabloii.net/blog/comments/how-diablo-evolved-from-turn-based-to-real-time https://www.diabloii.net/blog/comments/how-diablo-evolved-fr...
guard0g 9y ago
Back in the 90s, we use to run text-based adventure games called MUDs (e.g, PennMUD, TinyMUD, Islandia). Funny how it's circling back.
- 52-6F-62 9y ago
  This is a bit off topic, but you might just love http://www.SDF.org http://www.SDF.org
- wavefunction 9y ago
  Programming areas in a TinyMUD instance was my first experience with pseudo OOP as a 14 year old. Unfortunately my ambitions were larger than my practical knowledge at the time, but I was lucky to have some laid-back adult admins who indulged my interest and gave me a little corner of the world to develop.
- Jaruzel 9y ago
  Pop over and join us at https://www.reddit.com/r/MUD/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MUD/ You'll see that MUDs are still alive and kicking (Just!)
pwaivers 9y ago
I wonder how difficult it would be to adapt this game to read the text adventure out loud and allow visually impaired kids to play it. The author here has done tremendous work into the mechanics of a text-based game, and I think it would be a relatively small task to port it to an "audio-based" game. Every year I volunteer at as event at the University of North Carolina CS department called Maze Day. Students build games, which blind and handicapped children come and play on certain day. I think the children that visit in this event would LOVE a game like this, if it became accessible.
- DigitalJack 9y ago
  I don't think that would be difficult. In fact I think it would have a side benefit of improving the design of a text game... you could work on developing it with your eyes closed and the quality of the descriptions would become more apparent
- c22 9y ago
  Back when I played (text-based) MUDs I knew several blind players who played using screen readers. Some MUDs had features to support this, e.g. ability to disable extended descriptions. The savvy players wrote scripts that processed the text to extract the most important data during movement and combat. Some of them were quite good in player vs player.
- throwaway7645 9y ago
  Taustation is a neat scifi text adventure that's under active development. They do regular blog posts on a variety of topics from gameplay, UI, artwork. They've made it a big point to make sure it is as friendly as possible to visually impaired individuals. I'm not sure about support for blind individuals though.
- tarboreus 9y ago
  Blind dev here and I played through it. Might need a touch up here and there but it's moderately accessible as-is. Text-based games are great for VI people.
  - 9y ago
Aardwolf 9y ago
Oh that kind of text! First I thought it would be about rendering with ascii characters, like text mode quake http://web.archive.org/web/19990219125446/http://webpages.mr.net:80/bobz/ttyquake/ http://web.archive.org/web/19990219125446/http://webpages.mr... Too bad this gem is gone from the internet now, so that's an archive link :(
- stickydink 9y ago
  That second link seems to download just fine, shouldn't be hard to get it running again? :)
  - Something1234 9y ago
    Report back with your findings please if you try, please?
    - StavrosK 9y ago
      I tried to run it, but it's looking for a Quake executable called "squake", which I don't have and didn't manage to find.
      - shakna 9y ago
        QuakeOne has squake [0], the tar.gz contains only the executable, so you might end up coming back there looking for some more gear. [0] http://quakeone.com/q1files/downloads/ http://quakeone.com/q1files/downloads/
        StavrosK 9y ago
        Hmm yeah, now it's complaining about libm.so.5 missing...
        shakna 9y ago
        That should be part of libc 5.3, which would be hell to install side-by-side whichever version you currently have. Not a rabbit-hole to go down lightly. Maybe an old (2011-ish) Linux distro in a VM would be the way to go. If you want the effort. (I obviously don't feel like pursuing it myself).
e12e 9y ago
> Good text cannot have too much repetition. Repetitive text is boring. Try writing up everything that happens in the first five minutes of some Super Mario gameplay with prose that is fun to read. It’s impossible. This is true. But I still smile when I think of the phrase:"The Blue Yeek/Kobold/it/<other> dies in a fit of agony." (Originally encountered in Moria, now to be found in Moria/umoria/Angband). Mildly relevant: https://thebutterfly.deviantart.com/art/Moria-Filthy-Street-Urchin-109136974 https://thebutterfly.deviantart.com/art/Moria-Filthy-Street-... Relevant: apt install moria https://github.com/dungeons-of-moria/umoria https://github.com/dungeons-of-moria/umoria (which actually looks rather interesting as they claim having ported the code forward and tidied up quite a bit) [ed: I think there's another option for repetition: automatic success after a certain number of successes - similar to "auto-haggling" in shops in Moria - once you've haggled a certain number of times with a certain shop keeper, the game will "fast-forward" to settling the transaction without any interaction. This gives flavour (haggling in stores) and avoids (too much) grinding (forcing the player to go through routine, static interactions)). In the context of this post, it'd mean a low-level/young character would go through detailed actions to trap a rabbit, then automatically be able to trap a rabbit, but fight with an orc, then be able to "kill the orc", but need to detail the actions for fighting a band of orcs, then struggle to kill a dragon, but being able to simply "take out the orc war band" (with a suitable description, based on the adapted play style, from the "micro-managed" fights: "You sneak around upwind of the band, and after setting out a dozen arrows in front of you - take rapid aim and let fly a precise volley and the orcs. The last warrior realize their scout has fallen to your first arrow, just as your last pierces his left throat - and all is quiet except for the wet death rattle of the final fallen." Or something equivalent involving a fireball or charge and sword dance.]
lcfcjs2 9y ago
This reminds me of Shadows of Time MUDs on telnet, I wasted hours of playing those games.
NetStrikeForce 9y ago
Back in the early 2000's there was this driver/library to output any graphics in ASCII instead of framebuffer or whatever. A colleague had a Linux box at home with a TV Tuner PCI card. We would SSH from the University's lab and watch TV-on-ASCII-over-SSH to the amusement of the people around us. Sounds so simple and silly today, but it was a fun way to learn back in the day :)
- VectorLock 9y ago
  That would have been interesting, if a bit rehashy. This is a guy blurfing at length about text game design. The "Skyrim" is just thrown in there as a callback to something recognizable but has almost zero to do with Bethesda's game.
thedonkeycometh 9y ago
sigh I thought this was going to be a realtime AI which described the world from the frame
bduerst 9y ago
If anyone is interested in the Sorcery! series mentioned in the article, I highly recommend them. It's like a Choose Your Own Adventure, but with a highly polished board game feel. Once you finish one, you can bring your character over into the next in the series. The devs (Inkle) also were the ones who made 80 days, which won some amount of awards. https://www.inklestudios.com/sorcery/ https://www.inklestudios.com/sorcery/
PaulHoule 9y ago
I have long been puzzled by the "combat doesn't work in interactive fiction" conclusion that is common in the IF community. Combat in Skyrim is of the "simulated presence in a cyberspace" form, but there are many successful video games with turn-based combat (ex. Hyperdimension Neptunia, Atelier Rorona, etc.) that could be mapped directly to a text-based interface.
ratacat 9y ago
There are still several hundred once prominent MMOs called MUDs that came about in the 1980s and are all text based. They deal with these sorts of problems in very diverse and creative ways. If you've never played one, I might suggest Duris, Land of Bloodlust. It's old-school, beautiful, huge world and incredibly delicate, strategic and fun combat. It's a race wars, so RvR style full player killing and full player looting. Rough game :p but makes modern MMOs look like Fisher Price editions.
- astrobe_ 9y ago
  They can be found there for instance: http://www.mudconnect.com/ http://www.mudconnect.com/ I've played Aardwolf which is, from my limited experience, a good introduction (lots of people 24/7, helpers, tutorial). The great thing about MUDs is that you don't need 2D/3D/audio artists, so the resources go to the engine and world building. Some MUDs are focusing on role play, like Sindome. It's fascinating to listen people talking about how to RP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av1d4PtUCdE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av1d4PtUCdE
- filiph 9y ago
  Author of the article (and the game) here. I didn't mention MUDs because I didn't want to scare away people with more concepts, but of course they are a huge part of what I consider interactive fiction. I'm not sure if any MUD worked with something I'd call a "fractal story", though. The combat I remember was fun but it was always "you miss X. X hits you." I didn't play all MUDs, of course, so I'd love to know if there are any examples from that era.
  - ioddly 9y ago
    I think most MUDs definitely fall under what you described as "kill bandit," (as do many graphical MMOs), but I do recall a few exceptions. I remember God Wars II, for example, as a game that had more complex and interactive combat: http://www.godwars2.org http://www.godwars2.org
- qplex 9y ago
  >makes modern MMOs look like Fisher Price editions. From the point of view of the MMORPGs the MUDs don't look or sound much like anything. Literally.
Romanulus 9y ago
... Why not just Dwarf Fortress?
AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
>But let’s face it, combat is a big part of what makes Skyrim fun. So “kill bandit, kill archer” doesn’t quite cut it. I beg to differ. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3J8FYKZ52w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3J8FYKZ52w
- komali2 9y ago
  Yea I had to mod the fuck out of Skyrim to make the combat fun, and even then... eeeh I actually enjoyed stealth/archer as long as I didn't go too deep into the stealth tree, making me literally undetectable. Mage got fun when I found a hotkey mod. Combined with Apocalypse spells, I could switch through a bunch of fun spells really quickly. Kind of felt like playing an Elementalist in Guild Wars 2 when I got it right. Sword and board... never fun lol. Just running around lopping people's heads off gets old fast.
nategri 9y ago
Already wondering if you could port a text game this procedurally sophisticated to a 1980s platform like Apple ][.
8_hours_ago 9y ago
...procedural content is not for "lazy developers". It’s not there to free you from creating content. It’s there to let content react to the player. You still need a lot of it. This is a very good lesson for game developers. Too many games rely on procedurally generated content, which can be boring to a player if it seems random instead of being a result of some interaction (see No Man's Sky).
- optimuspaul 9y ago
  I really enjoy NMS but many aspects are boring. The generated landscapes are predicable, why is the climate on every planet uniform across the whole planet?
  - gnulinux 9y ago
    NMS is an example of bad procedural generation. Cellular automata, by nature, is a slow[1] algorithm, so it's hard to run automatas for every single planet you create. It's certainly possible, but as we've seen from NMS it's not straightforward to implement. [1] Actually you can heavily optimize cellular automata for cache, but a K dimensional automata will be in O(N^(K+1)) so assuming a 2D world, it's O(N^3). So, it's not scalable. If you look at procedural world generations in big scale, like dwarffortress, you'll see that they're one time operations that take a very long time. NMS is tricky, since you need to keep doing this multiple times.
CountHackulus 9y ago
This is so much better than I expected. I thought it was yet another person who put libcaca in front of a game but this. THIS! This is awesome! I used to love playing on the MOO and other MUDs and this brings me right back there. Excellent!
- oxide 9y ago
  Agreed. I was really pleasantly surprised about how wonderful this was. It brings me back to my years as a teen playing Graphical MUD's like The Realm Online, basically a text adventure with some wonderful pixel art and a point-and-click adventure interface UI. Made by Sierra in the late 90's, sold to Codemasters, ruined by Codemasters, and then re-sold to a private family instead of a development studio. The game slowly died thanks to a lack of even a SINGLE programmer...until recently: If you've never played The Realm Online, I highly recommend looking into the newly formed private servers, there are two of them (Sacred Temple / MistWalkers ) with a ton of changes since the people who own it have long since abandoned the game.
superflyguy 9y ago
Perhaps the next project can be rendering Medium.com as text, so I can read it on mobile. As it is, when I zoom in, random parts of the page expand on top of the text for what can only be lazy/incompetent web developer reasons since even the large font and loads of whitespace fetishists would have a hard time justifying that.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- milankovic 9y ago
  I know your pain.. But are you talking about the Medium App? Or just viewed with a mobile browser?
  - O4epegb 9y ago
    You can zoom in app?
    - milankovic 9y ago
      For images, yes. Don't think that you can zoom the text. At least I've not seen it yet. (Android App)
brlewis 9y ago
How important do you think illustrations are to this kind of text game? I would think omitting illustrations would free up a lot more time for expanding and improving the prose.
- scott_karana 9y ago
  I kinda liked them, personally. They were used sparingly, and only at clear "milestones", which made me take a step back instead of scrolling from action to action.
Mizza 9y ago
The game itself is here: https://egamebook.com/vermin/v/latest/ https://egamebook.com/vermin/v/latest/ I just played a round while I was on the train - it's _really_ good! Not only the play, but even the presentation of "loading" the next part of the game below the current text, as if it were any other book, is perfect for playing on mobile. I think this could really open up a whole new genre. Personally, I'd love to have a variant of this that I could interact with through my (in-home-corporate-surveillance-microphone-product-of-choice). I love interactive fiction, adventure games and DnD, so this really presses a lot of buttons for me, and if I could play a game with my voice rather than listening to podcasts while working all day, I think that'd be the sweetest spot of all. Excellent work, OP!
- StavrosK 9y ago
  If you like this, try Sorcery!, the mobile apps (and books, I think) it's based on. They are also quite good.
- smnscu 9y ago
  Just going through the game and I really enjoy it! This is absolutely my cup of tea, despite not being much into D&D. This guy curates an amazing set of playlists for D&D backgrounds, I had fun syncing them with what was happening in the game: https://open.spotify.com/user/bezoing https://open.spotify.com/user/bezoing edit: finished moments after writing the comment. I want more of this! Do you mind setting up a mailing list if you don't have one? SPOILERS Thanks for playing Insignificant Little Vermin. You took Orcthorn but didn't destroy the iron monster. You are leaving Mount Bloodrock with swords, spears and no shield. You are seriously injured and exhausted. Briana is wounded. The important thing, though, is that you survived. Congratulations!
  - filiph 9y ago
    Thanks! Yes, there is a low traffic mailing list. On mobile so can't share the link but if you open the game again and click the Info button, it's there.
    - 9y ago
btym 9y ago
When I clicked this article, I was expecting to see that someone had gotten Skyrim working with AAlib.
kermittd 9y ago
I only saw screenshots but looks great! A Fallout version would be incredible.
unhumanrights 9y ago
So wait, it's not really doing scene analysis and presenting a textual interface to interact with a real Skyrim instance? I want that now. Sad. Edit: Okay, but the game is pretty good so far. I forgive you.
andreareina 9y ago
> It’s easy to come up with “You hit orc for 15 HP”. It’s much harder to come up with many versions of “your blade misses the orc”. Dwarf Fortress has epic fight descriptions. Weapons getting stuck, severed body parts, grabbing said severed body parts and bashing the opponent with them... it does verge on too much detail though. There's also no concept of HP, deaths occur through e.g. bleeding out, organ failure, etc. I don't think it's too much of a problem to be somewhat repetitive with the miss; if you're missing enough that the repetitiveness is getting to you, you're probably doing something wrong. You can also borrow from the pen and paper games and have critical misses with adverse effects -- overbalance, enemy counters, etc.
- indigochill 9y ago
  The digital version of Sorcery! has the coolest text descriptions of combat short of Dwarf Fortress. You "fight" by committing a certain amount of regenerating energy each round. If you commit no energy, you're actively defending. Mechanically, there's no such thing as a miss in the system (although when you lose a round, sometimes it might be described as a miss). There are combat description pools explicitly handling cases where both combatants defend, where one attacks and the other defends, and when both attack but one overpowers the other. And the description pools are unique for every fight since of course a manticore and an assassin fight differently. The descriptions also are modified by the health of the combatants. In a fight with a manticore, the descriptions progressively showed the manticore becoming fearful as I started damaging it, then limping and struggling to fight as it got closer to death. Even though there was no mechanical difference, the descriptions really sold it.
kilburn 9y ago
This is very impressive, and left me longing for more! I'm not sure this is the direction you want to take, but I'll throw the idea in anyway. The format seems perfect to allow for user-made extensions: - Content creation requires lots of work, but the kind of work that many are able to pull of, unlike videogame-like artwork. - Being web-based, it should be possible to just link to new content: no need for downloads, plugins, etc. Combining these two, you could pull off a kind of "wikipedia-like" game. I'm envisioning a game where there is a "known world" (where you enter initially). This would be your content. At the edges, you can venture into the uncharted parts of the world (link to people-contributed content/worlds/adventures). These outward links could be randomized among user-submitted worlds. If some of those worlds becomes so good you want to officially sanction it, you can then announce it as "charted" and incorporate it to the known world, with a permanent non-random entry point. In my head, this would be very good because it would let you focus on the mechanic possibilities (which you seem to enjoy the most), freeing you from the content creation task while still building interesting game(s).
grrowl 9y ago
Working on a very similar problem, although multiplayer. Really really cool to follow someone's trial and error at this level of detail, with thought process and everything. Very excited for the "next generation" of Interactive Fiction games, and the actual game is very well polished in every regard. Great work.
indigochill 9y ago
OP, check out the Fabled Lands gamebook series (there's a fan-made Java app which has the six books currently published of the planned 12-book series, which also nicely handles all the bookkeeping). It doesn't solve your "interesting combat" problem, but it is the only case I know of where traditional IF (paper books, no less!) has done a truly open world RPG. You can for instance become a sailing merchant just by buying a boat and trading at the various ports. Or you can pursue various quests. I ended up being a street ruffian because I found a loop that involved me getting jumped in an alley and beating my attackers which was surprisingly lucrative and repeatable. There are also some quests which actually change the state of the world (this is done in a book by having you write a word on your character sheet and then directing you to different sections depending on the words you have on your sheet).

459 points by ellinokon 9y ago

Its time to stop!

bitL 9y ago

I first thought the author used real-time CNN + RNN to generate descriptions of the rendered Skyrim scene and showing only that one to the player.

duckarmada 9y ago
Exactly what I was thinking, which sounds like an interesting project in itself.
- michaelbuckbee 9y ago
  Similar, but I thought maybe they had just pulled the dialogue trees, locations, etc.

hmhrex 9y ago

I'm actually excited to see how this project turns out. I used to play these little text RPGs on my dad's Blackberry, and this kind of reminds me of those. I'd love to see a full game of this.

Rooster61 9y ago

"...an arrow slams into the ground less than an inch from your knee." Nice touch there :)

denisw 9y ago
Context for those who haven‘t played Skyrim: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-took-an-arrow-in-the-knee http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-took-an-arrow-in-the-knee

le-mark 9y ago

And during that project, I realized that text stories are fractal. Unlinke in videogames (which need a steady update method), in text we don’t actually need to stick to a single level of abstraction. Very cool, this is one of the most original things I've read about this year. The example he gives is different levels of commands and details during combat. Zelda 2 (I think) had a similar thing going from map view to side view for combat. But this is for text adventures. Mind blowing really.

filiph 9y ago
Thanks! Author here. I think quite a few videogames have different levels. For example, I remember an old 1990s game called Wargasm where you could both be the general and the soldier. It was a lot of fun. Most videogames don't go there, though, because it's more straightforward to use the game at a single "level". Even if they do have multiple levels, though, I don't think they ever go with more than 2 or 3. That would be just too confusing. In text, though, this is natural. Even in non-interactive books, you have things like "Conan wants revenge > Conan is on his way to Stygia > Conan meets cobras > Conan is being attacked by the King Cobra > King Cobra's attack goes above Conan's head > Conan thrusts sword upward".
- phlakaton 9y ago
  I think it's relatively common to the RPG genre to have multiple levels going on in a game. Minigames are a hallowed feature of most Final Fantasy installments, for example. Crafting might also be considered somewhat of a game. _Fractal_ design, though, implies some element of self-similarity between the levels – and that definitely seems like something more rare!
- subwayclub 9y ago
  Scope variance is actually really common in mobile games as well as RPGs and simulation. All of them share the same kind of design goal of bending time to fit a certain play session or inner/outer game loop length. More "immersive" games ignore the logistical problems of extreme detail and offer tools like time compression, but designing for accessibility bends things the other way, towards providing a spliced-up timeline where events don't have to happen in any particular order apart from one that builds up a sensible narrative. Hence you have the existence of things like equipment screens that can be popped up mid-battle, pausing everything to let you think about how to divide up loot. And the energy model in mobile F2P, which doesn't make a lick of sense but enforces limited session length and progression. You can take this even further when you think about power up items in pretty much any game.

haspok 9y ago

How old is the author I wonder? Did he not play Wizardry or any other similar game back in the 80s/90s, which implemented exactly this kind of gameplay? Wizardry 7 had so much - good quality - text in it (probably enough to fill a book) that it significantly accelerated my English learning at the time as a non-native English speaker. And the fighting system was very similar to what the author arrived at in the end. I for one would be very happy to see the return of this style of gaming - I haven't played computer games for so long, mostly because they are just all the same, 3D action and no substance. I would gladly read / interact with fantasy fiction like this though.

pjc50 9y ago
The author describes themselves as a "gamebook enthusiast" and mentions IFCOMP, so they're very much operating within the knowledge of the genre. What the article really is is a deconstruction, presented as to a novice; he's asking what interactional elements and primitives are required of both video-action and text-interactive games, in order to produce an action-IF game.
jamesrcole 9y ago
> I haven't played computer games for so long, mostly because they are just all the same, 3D action and no substance If that's your opinion of them then I don't think you've investigated them much, and are just jumping to conclusions.
- PostOnce 9y ago
  I still play all the time and there's some truth to them all being the same. They get more and more polished on a UI level, and more realistic looking, but remain static mechanically. For example, Skyrim doesn't do much mechanically that Ultima Underworld didn't. Ultima proper did all of that from a different perspective for a long while before that, too. The Witcher 3 is my absolute favorite RPG at least since Skyrim and probably supercedes it, but again, it's just super polished, it doesn't do much that's really new, that I haven't seen before in an RPG or other game. You pick speech options from dialogue trees, loot dead things, and fetch quest items, but you're in a cardboard world. The monsters just wait for you to come slaughter them, they're set-pieces whose purpose is to sit there until you arrive, then bite you. The world reacts largely in a single specific way: you win. Actually, I thing modern RPGs have regressed, Ultima VI's keyword-based dialogue was better than our modern dialogue trees. You could speak in natural language about a variety of topics, some of which were hinted at by the NPC with highlighted words, and others you had to figure out for yourself. (you could just type "troll" or you could type "What can you tell me about the troll?" or "I have seen a troll, and need advice, can you help?", it was more fun and interactive) I'm hyped for Underworld Ascendant, because just maybe they'll break some new ground for a change. "A living ecosystem", but with people who can (and have) backed up that claim. I don't see much else on the horizon -- the indies are our only hopes! AAA can't afford to lose now, so it's all cookie cutter sequels there, only the indies can afford the risk. I think a huge, huge part of the problem is that games cost so much and carry so much risk now. Ultima Underworld got a full sequel _ELEVEN MONTHS LATER_. You could move faster and try more then, because art didn't cost so much, there was no motion capture, no voice acting, it was cheap to make a game. If a sequel flops now you can't just try again, you lost $75,000,000 dollars and are now bankrupt. Anyway, here's a link to a free, breathtakingly good book on the history of CRPGs from the 70s through today: https://crpgbook.wordpress.com/ https://crpgbook.wordpress.com/

lawlessone 9y ago

I wonder could to do this backwards? Create a system knows the setting/contexts etc of a text adventure game and renders a scene? edit: perhaps authors could add other tags/meta the user would not see but would add to the description

LoSboccacc 9y ago
I did some experimentation there - coded a turn based combat sistem and bolted on a real time combat. It's a magnitude easier than what proposed here, because you can code statefulness on the combat turns and that'll render quite fine and coherently. The only glitch that I had was at target switch (it's a 4x space themed coffee breaker) where you can see the ship smapping to the new target and that's it - but the nature if the turn sytem means I can easily code in a turn skip on target chane and tween the rotation. but if you want a prime example, the dwarf fortress visualizers take that concept to an incredible heights.
- amaranth 9y ago
  Diablo started out as a turn-based game and to change it to real time it seems like they basically just made the turns advance automatically via a game state tick call (20 times a second or whatever) and tweaked how long actions took so it looked like the player and world were acting simultaneously. https://www.diabloii.net/blog/comments/how-diablo-evolved-from-turn-based-to-real-time https://www.diabloii.net/blog/comments/how-diablo-evolved-fr...

guard0g 9y ago

Back in the 90s, we use to run text-based adventure games called MUDs (e.g, PennMUD, TinyMUD, Islandia). Funny how it's circling back.

52-6F-62 9y ago
This is a bit off topic, but you might just love http://www.SDF.org http://www.SDF.org
wavefunction 9y ago
Programming areas in a TinyMUD instance was my first experience with pseudo OOP as a 14 year old. Unfortunately my ambitions were larger than my practical knowledge at the time, but I was lucky to have some laid-back adult admins who indulged my interest and gave me a little corner of the world to develop.
Jaruzel 9y ago
Pop over and join us at https://www.reddit.com/r/MUD/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MUD/ You'll see that MUDs are still alive and kicking (Just!)

pwaivers 9y ago

I wonder how difficult it would be to adapt this game to read the text adventure out loud and allow visually impaired kids to play it. The author here has done tremendous work into the mechanics of a text-based game, and I think it would be a relatively small task to port it to an "audio-based" game. Every year I volunteer at as event at the University of North Carolina CS department called Maze Day. Students build games, which blind and handicapped children come and play on certain day. I think the children that visit in this event would LOVE a game like this, if it became accessible.

DigitalJack 9y ago
I don't think that would be difficult. In fact I think it would have a side benefit of improving the design of a text game... you could work on developing it with your eyes closed and the quality of the descriptions would become more apparent
c22 9y ago
Back when I played (text-based) MUDs I knew several blind players who played using screen readers. Some MUDs had features to support this, e.g. ability to disable extended descriptions. The savvy players wrote scripts that processed the text to extract the most important data during movement and combat. Some of them were quite good in player vs player.
throwaway7645 9y ago
Taustation is a neat scifi text adventure that's under active development. They do regular blog posts on a variety of topics from gameplay, UI, artwork. They've made it a big point to make sure it is as friendly as possible to visually impaired individuals. I'm not sure about support for blind individuals though.
tarboreus 9y ago
Blind dev here and I played through it. Might need a touch up here and there but it's moderately accessible as-is. Text-based games are great for VI people.
- 9y ago

Aardwolf 9y ago

Oh that kind of text! First I thought it would be about rendering with ascii characters, like text mode quake http://web.archive.org/web/19990219125446/http://webpages.mr.net:80/bobz/ttyquake/ http://web.archive.org/web/19990219125446/http://webpages.mr... Too bad this gem is gone from the internet now, so that's an archive link :(

stickydink 9y ago
That second link seems to download just fine, shouldn't be hard to get it running again? :)
- Something1234 9y ago
  Report back with your findings please if you try, please?
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    I tried to run it, but it's looking for a Quake executable called "squake", which I don't have and didn't manage to find.
    - shakna 9y ago
      QuakeOne has squake [0], the tar.gz contains only the executable, so you might end up coming back there looking for some more gear. [0] http://quakeone.com/q1files/downloads/ http://quakeone.com/q1files/downloads/
      - StavrosK 9y ago
        Hmm yeah, now it's complaining about libm.so.5 missing...
        shakna 9y ago
        That should be part of libc 5.3, which would be hell to install side-by-side whichever version you currently have. Not a rabbit-hole to go down lightly. Maybe an old (2011-ish) Linux distro in a VM would be the way to go. If you want the effort. (I obviously don't feel like pursuing it myself).

e12e 9y ago

> Good text cannot have too much repetition. Repetitive text is boring. Try writing up everything that happens in the first five minutes of some Super Mario gameplay with prose that is fun to read. It’s impossible. This is true. But I still smile when I think of the phrase:"The Blue Yeek/Kobold/it/<other> dies in a fit of agony." (Originally encountered in Moria, now to be found in Moria/umoria/Angband). Mildly relevant: https://thebutterfly.deviantart.com/art/Moria-Filthy-Street-Urchin-109136974 https://thebutterfly.deviantart.com/art/Moria-Filthy-Street-... Relevant: apt install moria https://github.com/dungeons-of-moria/umoria https://github.com/dungeons-of-moria/umoria (which actually looks rather interesting as they claim having ported the code forward and tidied up quite a bit) [ed: I think there's another option for repetition: automatic success after a certain number of successes - similar to "auto-haggling" in shops in Moria - once you've haggled a certain number of times with a certain shop keeper, the game will "fast-forward" to settling the transaction without any interaction. This gives flavour (haggling in stores) and avoids (too much) grinding (forcing the player to go through routine, static interactions)). In the context of this post, it'd mean a low-level/young character would go through detailed actions to trap a rabbit, then automatically be able to trap a rabbit, but fight with an orc, then be able to "kill the orc", but need to detail the actions for fighting a band of orcs, then struggle to kill a dragon, but being able to simply "take out the orc war band" (with a suitable description, based on the adapted play style, from the "micro-managed" fights: "You sneak around upwind of the band, and after setting out a dozen arrows in front of you - take rapid aim and let fly a precise volley and the orcs. The last warrior realize their scout has fallen to your first arrow, just as your last pierces his left throat - and all is quiet except for the wet death rattle of the final fallen." Or something equivalent involving a fireball or charge and sword dance.]

lcfcjs2 9y ago

This reminds me of Shadows of Time MUDs on telnet, I wasted hours of playing those games.

NetStrikeForce 9y ago

Back in the early 2000's there was this driver/library to output any graphics in ASCII instead of framebuffer or whatever. A colleague had a Linux box at home with a TV Tuner PCI card. We would SSH from the University's lab and watch TV-on-ASCII-over-SSH to the amusement of the people around us. Sounds so simple and silly today, but it was a fun way to learn back in the day :)

VectorLock 9y ago
That would have been interesting, if a bit rehashy. This is a guy blurfing at length about text game design. The "Skyrim" is just thrown in there as a callback to something recognizable but has almost zero to do with Bethesda's game.

thedonkeycometh 9y ago

sigh I thought this was going to be a realtime AI which described the world from the frame

bduerst 9y ago

If anyone is interested in the Sorcery! series mentioned in the article, I highly recommend them. It's like a Choose Your Own Adventure, but with a highly polished board game feel. Once you finish one, you can bring your character over into the next in the series. The devs (Inkle) also were the ones who made 80 days, which won some amount of awards. https://www.inklestudios.com/sorcery/ https://www.inklestudios.com/sorcery/

PaulHoule 9y ago

I have long been puzzled by the "combat doesn't work in interactive fiction" conclusion that is common in the IF community. Combat in Skyrim is of the "simulated presence in a cyberspace" form, but there are many successful video games with turn-based combat (ex. Hyperdimension Neptunia, Atelier Rorona, etc.) that could be mapped directly to a text-based interface.

ratacat 9y ago

There are still several hundred once prominent MMOs called MUDs that came about in the 1980s and are all text based. They deal with these sorts of problems in very diverse and creative ways. If you've never played one, I might suggest Duris, Land of Bloodlust. It's old-school, beautiful, huge world and incredibly delicate, strategic and fun combat. It's a race wars, so RvR style full player killing and full player looting. Rough game :p but makes modern MMOs look like Fisher Price editions.

astrobe_ 9y ago
They can be found there for instance: http://www.mudconnect.com/ http://www.mudconnect.com/ I've played Aardwolf which is, from my limited experience, a good introduction (lots of people 24/7, helpers, tutorial). The great thing about MUDs is that you don't need 2D/3D/audio artists, so the resources go to the engine and world building. Some MUDs are focusing on role play, like Sindome. It's fascinating to listen people talking about how to RP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av1d4PtUCdE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av1d4PtUCdE
filiph 9y ago
Author of the article (and the game) here. I didn't mention MUDs because I didn't want to scare away people with more concepts, but of course they are a huge part of what I consider interactive fiction. I'm not sure if any MUD worked with something I'd call a "fractal story", though. The combat I remember was fun but it was always "you miss X. X hits you." I didn't play all MUDs, of course, so I'd love to know if there are any examples from that era.
- ioddly 9y ago
  I think most MUDs definitely fall under what you described as "kill bandit," (as do many graphical MMOs), but I do recall a few exceptions. I remember God Wars II, for example, as a game that had more complex and interactive combat: http://www.godwars2.org http://www.godwars2.org
qplex 9y ago
>makes modern MMOs look like Fisher Price editions. From the point of view of the MMORPGs the MUDs don't look or sound much like anything. Literally.

Romanulus 9y ago

... Why not just Dwarf Fortress?

AdmiralAsshat 9y ago

>But let’s face it, combat is a big part of what makes Skyrim fun. So “kill bandit, kill archer” doesn’t quite cut it. I beg to differ. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3J8FYKZ52w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3J8FYKZ52w

komali2 9y ago
Yea I had to mod the fuck out of Skyrim to make the combat fun, and even then... eeeh I actually enjoyed stealth/archer as long as I didn't go too deep into the stealth tree, making me literally undetectable. Mage got fun when I found a hotkey mod. Combined with Apocalypse spells, I could switch through a bunch of fun spells really quickly. Kind of felt like playing an Elementalist in Guild Wars 2 when I got it right. Sword and board... never fun lol. Just running around lopping people's heads off gets old fast.

nategri 9y ago

Already wondering if you could port a text game this procedurally sophisticated to a 1980s platform like Apple ][.

8_hours_ago 9y ago

...procedural content is not for "lazy developers". It’s not there to free you from creating content. It’s there to let content react to the player. You still need a lot of it. This is a very good lesson for game developers. Too many games rely on procedurally generated content, which can be boring to a player if it seems random instead of being a result of some interaction (see No Man's Sky).

optimuspaul 9y ago
I really enjoy NMS but many aspects are boring. The generated landscapes are predicable, why is the climate on every planet uniform across the whole planet?
- gnulinux 9y ago
  NMS is an example of bad procedural generation. Cellular automata, by nature, is a slow[1] algorithm, so it's hard to run automatas for every single planet you create. It's certainly possible, but as we've seen from NMS it's not straightforward to implement. [1] Actually you can heavily optimize cellular automata for cache, but a K dimensional automata will be in O(N^(K+1)) so assuming a 2D world, it's O(N^3). So, it's not scalable. If you look at procedural world generations in big scale, like dwarffortress, you'll see that they're one time operations that take a very long time. NMS is tricky, since you need to keep doing this multiple times.

CountHackulus 9y ago

This is so much better than I expected. I thought it was yet another person who put libcaca in front of a game but this. THIS! This is awesome! I used to love playing on the MOO and other MUDs and this brings me right back there. Excellent!

oxide 9y ago
Agreed. I was really pleasantly surprised about how wonderful this was. It brings me back to my years as a teen playing Graphical MUD's like The Realm Online, basically a text adventure with some wonderful pixel art and a point-and-click adventure interface UI. Made by Sierra in the late 90's, sold to Codemasters, ruined by Codemasters, and then re-sold to a private family instead of a development studio. The game slowly died thanks to a lack of even a SINGLE programmer...until recently: If you've never played The Realm Online, I highly recommend looking into the newly formed private servers, there are two of them (Sacred Temple / MistWalkers ) with a ton of changes since the people who own it have long since abandoned the game.

superflyguy 9y ago

Perhaps the next project can be rendering Medium.com as text, so I can read it on mobile. As it is, when I zoom in, random parts of the page expand on top of the text for what can only be lazy/incompetent web developer reasons since even the large font and loads of whitespace fetishists would have a hard time justifying that.

deleted 9y ago
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milankovic 9y ago
I know your pain.. But are you talking about the Medium App? Or just viewed with a mobile browser?
- O4epegb 9y ago
  You can zoom in app?
  - milankovic 9y ago
    For images, yes. Don't think that you can zoom the text. At least I've not seen it yet. (Android App)

brlewis 9y ago

How important do you think illustrations are to this kind of text game? I would think omitting illustrations would free up a lot more time for expanding and improving the prose.

scott_karana 9y ago
I kinda liked them, personally. They were used sparingly, and only at clear "milestones", which made me take a step back instead of scrolling from action to action.

Mizza 9y ago

The game itself is here: https://egamebook.com/vermin/v/latest/ https://egamebook.com/vermin/v/latest/ I just played a round while I was on the train - it's _really_ good! Not only the play, but even the presentation of "loading" the next part of the game below the current text, as if it were any other book, is perfect for playing on mobile. I think this could really open up a whole new genre. Personally, I'd love to have a variant of this that I could interact with through my (in-home-corporate-surveillance-microphone-product-of-choice). I love interactive fiction, adventure games and DnD, so this really presses a lot of buttons for me, and if I could play a game with my voice rather than listening to podcasts while working all day, I think that'd be the sweetest spot of all. Excellent work, OP!

StavrosK 9y ago
If you like this, try Sorcery!, the mobile apps (and books, I think) it's based on. They are also quite good.
smnscu 9y ago
Just going through the game and I really enjoy it! This is absolutely my cup of tea, despite not being much into D&D. This guy curates an amazing set of playlists for D&D backgrounds, I had fun syncing them with what was happening in the game: https://open.spotify.com/user/bezoing https://open.spotify.com/user/bezoing edit: finished moments after writing the comment. I want more of this! Do you mind setting up a mailing list if you don't have one? SPOILERS Thanks for playing Insignificant Little Vermin. You took Orcthorn but didn't destroy the iron monster. You are leaving Mount Bloodrock with swords, spears and no shield. You are seriously injured and exhausted. Briana is wounded. The important thing, though, is that you survived. Congratulations!
- filiph 9y ago
  Thanks! Yes, there is a low traffic mailing list. On mobile so can't share the link but if you open the game again and click the Info button, it's there.
  - 9y ago

btym 9y ago

When I clicked this article, I was expecting to see that someone had gotten Skyrim working with AAlib.

kermittd 9y ago

I only saw screenshots but looks great! A Fallout version would be incredible.

unhumanrights 9y ago

So wait, it's not really doing scene analysis and presenting a textual interface to interact with a real Skyrim instance? I want that now. Sad. Edit: Okay, but the game is pretty good so far. I forgive you.

andreareina 9y ago

> It’s easy to come up with “You hit orc for 15 HP”. It’s much harder to come up with many versions of “your blade misses the orc”. Dwarf Fortress has epic fight descriptions. Weapons getting stuck, severed body parts, grabbing said severed body parts and bashing the opponent with them... it does verge on too much detail though. There's also no concept of HP, deaths occur through e.g. bleeding out, organ failure, etc. I don't think it's too much of a problem to be somewhat repetitive with the miss; if you're missing enough that the repetitiveness is getting to you, you're probably doing something wrong. You can also borrow from the pen and paper games and have critical misses with adverse effects -- overbalance, enemy counters, etc.

indigochill 9y ago
The digital version of Sorcery! has the coolest text descriptions of combat short of Dwarf Fortress. You "fight" by committing a certain amount of regenerating energy each round. If you commit no energy, you're actively defending. Mechanically, there's no such thing as a miss in the system (although when you lose a round, sometimes it might be described as a miss). There are combat description pools explicitly handling cases where both combatants defend, where one attacks and the other defends, and when both attack but one overpowers the other. And the description pools are unique for every fight since of course a manticore and an assassin fight differently. The descriptions also are modified by the health of the combatants. In a fight with a manticore, the descriptions progressively showed the manticore becoming fearful as I started damaging it, then limping and struggling to fight as it got closer to death. Even though there was no mechanical difference, the descriptions really sold it.

kilburn 9y ago

This is very impressive, and left me longing for more! I'm not sure this is the direction you want to take, but I'll throw the idea in anyway. The format seems perfect to allow for user-made extensions: - Content creation requires lots of work, but the kind of work that many are able to pull of, unlike videogame-like artwork. - Being web-based, it should be possible to just link to new content: no need for downloads, plugins, etc. Combining these two, you could pull off a kind of "wikipedia-like" game. I'm envisioning a game where there is a "known world" (where you enter initially). This would be your content. At the edges, you can venture into the uncharted parts of the world (link to people-contributed content/worlds/adventures). These outward links could be randomized among user-submitted worlds. If some of those worlds becomes so good you want to officially sanction it, you can then announce it as "charted" and incorporate it to the known world, with a permanent non-random entry point. In my head, this would be very good because it would let you focus on the mechanic possibilities (which you seem to enjoy the most), freeing you from the content creation task while still building interesting game(s).

grrowl 9y ago

Working on a very similar problem, although multiplayer. Really really cool to follow someone's trial and error at this level of detail, with thought process and everything. Very excited for the "next generation" of Interactive Fiction games, and the actual game is very well polished in every regard. Great work.

indigochill 9y ago

OP, check out the Fabled Lands gamebook series (there's a fan-made Java app which has the six books currently published of the planned 12-book series, which also nicely handles all the bookkeeping). It doesn't solve your "interesting combat" problem, but it is the only case I know of where traditional IF (paper books, no less!) has done a truly open world RPG. You can for instance become a sailing merchant just by buying a boat and trading at the various ports. Or you can pursue various quests. I ended up being a street ruffian because I found a loop that involved me getting jumped in an alley and beating my attackers which was surprisingly lucrative and repeatable. There are also some quests which actually change the state of the world (this is done in a book by having you write a word on your character sheet and then directing you to different sections depending on the words you have on your sheet).