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Love this subject. I tried this sort of thing back in the 90s when I was learning BASIC and making text adventures, but it was way beyond my skill (and probably

Love this subject. I tried this sort of thing back in the 90s when I was learning BASIC and making text adventures, but it was way beyond my skill (and probably not best implemented in BASIC). I've revisited the topic thinking about AI story generation, but that comes with its own challenges (mainly how to manipulate the world state to solve a particular problem in an interesting way). Anyway, this video does make me want to try creating some text adventures again...

ud_0 5y ago
> I tried this sort of thing back in the 90s when I was learning BASIC and making text adventure Same here :D I really like the idea, but I see problems. I'm still watching the video, so maybe they'll be addressed. Repetition: repetition in text can get quite jarring if the text is written like a novel, as opposed to the classic RPG way of displaying it as a text log. It's not unsolvable, but it certainly is difficult. Not only does avoiding repetition require knowledge of previously generated text, I think it also requires adjustments to the game world itself. It can't be Skyrim in that regard, it needs to generate unique and meaningful situations. Effort of parsing: it takes the user a lot more effort to parse free-flowing text, as opposed to graphical shorthand representations or even photorealistic scenes. We like to spend that effort when we read stories because we get something in return. I'm less convinced that a completely automated but open world can offer the same appeal. It doesn't seem impossible, but it's certainly quite hard. Of course the other alternative to generating meaning as a reward for the brain's effort to parse the text is to just generate the text with predictable patterns. In that case though, we are exactly back at the point where MUDs left off. Not that this is a bad thing, necessarily. Admittedly, I'm probably just jaded and very dubious about well-produced videos making a lot of grandiose promises when it comes to games. I would certainly buy this game and give it a try.
- onli 5y ago
  He indeed addresses repetition later, in the context of battles. Without wanting to spoil too much (but many won't watch a full video), cutting the battles short by making each attack more deadly is his solution. > Admittedly, I'm probably just jaded and very dubious about well-produced videos making a lot of grandiose promises when it comes to games. I would certainly buy this game and give it a try. Do that! The result he produced so far is a very exciting experiment. https://egamebook.com/knights/ https://egamebook.com/knights/ (no affiliation on my part, I just love the concept of these games).
  - filiph 5y ago
    Author here. To clarify, the way to address repetition was not so much making battles shorter, but making effects less numeric and more radical. You can still spend a long time battling, but instead of decreasing hitpoints, you: fall on the ground, stab a leg, stand up, get leapt at, dodge, chop off a hand, get stabbed in the eye, and finally break a skull.
smcameron 5y ago
There's nanogenmo[1], "Spend the month of November writing code that generates a novel of 50k+ words." I tried this once by essentially making a Zork-like text adventure that played itself. The result[2] was horrible. [1] https://nanogenmo.github.io/ https://nanogenmo.github.io/ [2] https://github.com/smcameron/nanogenmo-2017 https://github.com/smcameron/nanogenmo-2017
- filiph 5y ago
  Oh hey! Author of the video here. I also tried NaNoGenMo in 2017 with my "Infinite Fight Scene" [1], a novel that is one long fight, utilizing an earlier version of the same system. I think I remember your entry (I'm a sucker for space opera). I thought it was great! [1]: https://github.com/filiph/edgehead/raw/nanogenmo2017/output2.pdf https://github.com/filiph/edgehead/raw/nanogenmo2017/output2...
grawprog 5y ago
You could always check out AIDungeon for some ideas about how AI story generation goes. It works alright for story generation as long as you don't mind editing or retrtying , but as an actual game, not so much. They added some game like features in there, but they don't work very well. As far as actually writing a text adventure game goes these days, there's lots of options for languages and libraries that are specific to making text adventures. There's Inform and TADS for making parser based games. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TADS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TADS There's renpy, Quest and a bunch of others for making more visual novel/choose your own adventure style stories. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%27Py https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%27Py http://textadventures.co.uk/quest/ http://textadventures.co.uk/quest/ There's actually still a fairly large text based game community out there these days.
- shannifin 5y ago
  I actually didn't find AI Dungeon to be very useful for story generation, unfortunately. It's nice for generating ideas, but lacks the logical consistency and creative problem solving needed to go meaningfully beyond that, at least as far as my experimenting with it went.
  - grawprog 5y ago
    Yeah, you have to do a lot of the work in the end. My point was mostly, ai doesn't actually work that well for this. I don't think it's quite ready yet to give the level of creativity yet constrained freedom most well written text adventure games can give. That along with things like NovelAi and Koboldai are probably the best at it right now.

ud_0 5y ago

> I tried this sort of thing back in the 90s when I was learning BASIC and making text adventure Same here :D I really like the idea, but I see problems. I'm still watching the video, so maybe they'll be addressed. Repetition: repetition in text can get quite jarring if the text is written like a novel, as opposed to the classic RPG way of displaying it as a text log. It's not unsolvable, but it certainly is difficult. Not only does avoiding repetition require knowledge of previously generated text, I think it also requires adjustments to the game world itself. It can't be Skyrim in that regard, it needs to generate unique and meaningful situations. Effort of parsing: it takes the user a lot more effort to parse free-flowing text, as opposed to graphical shorthand representations or even photorealistic scenes. We like to spend that effort when we read stories because we get something in return. I'm less convinced that a completely automated but open world can offer the same appeal. It doesn't seem impossible, but it's certainly quite hard. Of course the other alternative to generating meaning as a reward for the brain's effort to parse the text is to just generate the text with predictable patterns. In that case though, we are exactly back at the point where MUDs left off. Not that this is a bad thing, necessarily. Admittedly, I'm probably just jaded and very dubious about well-produced videos making a lot of grandiose promises when it comes to games. I would certainly buy this game and give it a try.

onli 5y ago
He indeed addresses repetition later, in the context of battles. Without wanting to spoil too much (but many won't watch a full video), cutting the battles short by making each attack more deadly is his solution. > Admittedly, I'm probably just jaded and very dubious about well-produced videos making a lot of grandiose promises when it comes to games. I would certainly buy this game and give it a try. Do that! The result he produced so far is a very exciting experiment. https://egamebook.com/knights/ https://egamebook.com/knights/ (no affiliation on my part, I just love the concept of these games).
- filiph 5y ago
  Author here. To clarify, the way to address repetition was not so much making battles shorter, but making effects less numeric and more radical. You can still spend a long time battling, but instead of decreasing hitpoints, you: fall on the ground, stab a leg, stand up, get leapt at, dodge, chop off a hand, get stabbed in the eye, and finally break a skull.

smcameron 5y ago

There's nanogenmo[1], "Spend the month of November writing code that generates a novel of 50k+ words." I tried this once by essentially making a Zork-like text adventure that played itself. The result[2] was horrible. [1] https://nanogenmo.github.io/ https://nanogenmo.github.io/ [2] https://github.com/smcameron/nanogenmo-2017 https://github.com/smcameron/nanogenmo-2017

filiph 5y ago
Oh hey! Author of the video here. I also tried NaNoGenMo in 2017 with my "Infinite Fight Scene" [1], a novel that is one long fight, utilizing an earlier version of the same system. I think I remember your entry (I'm a sucker for space opera). I thought it was great! [1]: https://github.com/filiph/edgehead/raw/nanogenmo2017/output2.pdf https://github.com/filiph/edgehead/raw/nanogenmo2017/output2...

grawprog 5y ago

You could always check out AIDungeon for some ideas about how AI story generation goes. It works alright for story generation as long as you don't mind editing or retrtying , but as an actual game, not so much. They added some game like features in there, but they don't work very well. As far as actually writing a text adventure game goes these days, there's lots of options for languages and libraries that are specific to making text adventures. There's Inform and TADS for making parser based games. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TADS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TADS There's renpy, Quest and a bunch of others for making more visual novel/choose your own adventure style stories. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%27Py https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%27Py http://textadventures.co.uk/quest/ http://textadventures.co.uk/quest/ There's actually still a fairly large text based game community out there these days.

shannifin 5y ago
I actually didn't find AI Dungeon to be very useful for story generation, unfortunately. It's nice for generating ideas, but lacks the logical consistency and creative problem solving needed to go meaningfully beyond that, at least as far as my experimenting with it went.
- grawprog 5y ago
  Yeah, you have to do a lot of the work in the end. My point was mostly, ai doesn't actually work that well for this. I don't think it's quite ready yet to give the level of creativity yet constrained freedom most well written text adventure games can give. That along with things like NovelAi and Koboldai are probably the best at it right now.