6 ms·

How to make a Text Adventure

51 points by willvarfar 15y ago

dfan 15y ago
I don't understand how the fact that Inform 7 syntax looks like natural language means that "you don't write any code at all." It's actually a really interesting domain-specific language, though I don't know how well its lessons generalize.
- willvarfar 15y ago
  (blog author) Yes I didn't mean that; I'll rephrase Good catch.
- zem 15y ago
  the drawback (from the author's "where's the fun in that?" pov) is that inform7 is for people who want to write text adventures, rather than text adventure engines.
tikhonj 15y ago
One of the projects in my very first CS course in college (based around SICP) was to write a text adventure game in Scheme. It was certainly an interesting project and a good introduction to OOP, but also a little tedious. If we were working on our own stories instead of implementing the map and objects from a project spec, it would have been much more interesting.
starwed 15y ago
>We wanted to use Javascript so that the game could run in your browser. But there are already at least two javascfipt interpreters for games written in Inform 7 already! http://code.google.com/p/parchment/ http://code.google.com/p/parchment/ http://eblong.com/zarf/glulx/quixe/ http://eblong.com/zarf/glulx/quixe/
- lygaret 15y ago
  And a pretty neat site with parchment set up and hosting things: http://playfic.com http://playfic.com
zserge 15y ago
Talking about text adventures, the INSTEAD project is worth trying. It's a simple text adventure game engine written in Lua and ported to many platforms, including Android. http://code.google.com/p/instead/ http://code.google.com/p/instead/ Also, it includes some really interesting games.
- brianobush 15y ago
  Cool, I have a text adventure idea I would like to try my hand at... however, the examples are in Russian. Hmm,..
  - zserge 15y ago
    Yes, the developer is from Russia. But there's a nice english documentation as well: http://instead.syscall.ru/wiki/en/gamedev/documentation http://instead.syscall.ru/wiki/en/gamedev/documentation Plus, INSTEAD supports URQ games that have a much more simplified syntax.
    - brianobush 15y ago
      wow, that is seriously nice documentation. Thanks!
iRobot 15y ago
Text adventures rocked until dungeon master came along and nuked the genre. They may be nice to code, but life's too short and I would not play one again.
ivan_ah 15y ago
Very cool. I have never played text adventures on a computer, but I like the simplicity of the idea of "connection between places". Two suggestions: (A) You add a onkeypress listeners for the arrow keys to mean: NORTH, EAST, WEST, SOUTH? (B) Add an ASCII ART version ;) Text adventures are not too far from "choose your own adventure" books.... hm... this will kick ass as an educational app. Imagine the island is full of "level spots" like in Mario World and each "spot" is one question from khan-exercises.
- willvarfar 15y ago
  Thanks :) I think arrow keys are a bit overloaded inside text boxes already and should be used for editing, but I would add "w" as a shortcut for "west" and "e" for "east" etc if I could travel back in time. Would also have added command-auto-completion like in IDEs. That'd stop the complaints by people who don't know to type "HELP" ;)
- power 15y ago
  If you're interested in text adventures and their history you should check out the documentary Get Lamp (http://www.getlamp.com http://www.getlamp.com)
jiggy2011 15y ago
I'm surprised there hasn't been more of a text adventure resurgence of late. I can't remember playing one since MUDS were cool. I don't even necessarily mean a fully text only game. What about something like a slow paced game that combined beautiful prose read by a talented voice actor with static hand drawn graphics or fully ray traced scenes. Also we have better NLP now and better voice recognition which would make things more interesting.
- gmkoliver 15y ago
  Text adventures (interactive fiction), and muds for that matter, are alive and well. I've been an active participant in both communities for many years so I feel like I have some perspective on it; in fact I'd say text adventures have seen a resurgence in the last few years. It's hard to say how much of that is fueled by nostalgia though.
jimmytucson 15y ago
I enjoyed this article, thanks! Playing MUDs was one of my favorite pastimes in high school and I often wonder whether text-based games will enjoy a resurgence with the many new technologies being developed. Side question... he mentions how you can't quite achieve this "room" object in Python: >you can’t turn to anonymous functions because Python doesn’t have them. You can’t use dot notation to dereference the fields inside the structure because Python uses [“key”] notation. Why couldn't you subclass an object that has an 'on_enter' method? A nice side benefit would be that you'd be able to use dot notation to refer to its attributes! class Kitchen(Location): name = 'kitchen' description = 'Your kitchen is untidy and cramped.' visits = 0 def on_enter(self): if (self.visits == 0): #first time in this room ... So far the magic of Javascript has been a bit over my head but I want to learn more. Why is this something you'd need anonymous functions to accomplish? (And why not just use Perl or some other language with them as opposed to JS?)
- natep 15y ago
  When I see your class definition, I think "why define a whole class for just 1 room?" because then you have to separately define and instantiate every class, an everything would effectively be a singleton (even if you didn't follow the pattern). If you can treat code as data, and concisely define an anonymous function, it saves a step. Speaking of code==data and text adventures, I'm currently working my way through the book Land of Lisp[1]. Some chapters just focus on new concepts, but most illustrate concepts through the creation of a game (except for the streams chapter, which has you write a web server). The first game is an extremely basic text adventure. You can only move around and pick up objects, but it did parse 'normal' keyboard input. Now that I'm a few chapters deeper, I'm starting to see how it could be expanded to handle different actions, etc. Another interesting approach to web-based adventure games is "Adventure Games Live". Instead of typing, you select a radio button for the action you want. Some of those games are extremely challenging (I've spent hours playing and haven't finished many of them) [1] landoflisp.com [2] http://www.rinkworks.com/adventure/ http://www.rinkworks.com/adventure/
ragmondo 15y ago
I started making a text adventure over google chat - based on app engine (not that this matters). The idea being that you could add / update / change the "world structure" as well. Oh and it could easily be an MMO as well. Anybody interested in helping me out / taking this over?

51 points by willvarfar 15y ago

dfan 15y ago

I don't understand how the fact that Inform 7 syntax looks like natural language means that "you don't write any code at all." It's actually a really interesting domain-specific language, though I don't know how well its lessons generalize.

willvarfar 15y ago
(blog author) Yes I didn't mean that; I'll rephrase Good catch.
zem 15y ago
the drawback (from the author's "where's the fun in that?" pov) is that inform7 is for people who want to write text adventures, rather than text adventure engines.

tikhonj 15y ago

One of the projects in my very first CS course in college (based around SICP) was to write a text adventure game in Scheme. It was certainly an interesting project and a good introduction to OOP, but also a little tedious. If we were working on our own stories instead of implementing the map and objects from a project spec, it would have been much more interesting.

starwed 15y ago

>We wanted to use Javascript so that the game could run in your browser. But there are already at least two javascfipt interpreters for games written in Inform 7 already! http://code.google.com/p/parchment/ http://code.google.com/p/parchment/ http://eblong.com/zarf/glulx/quixe/ http://eblong.com/zarf/glulx/quixe/

lygaret 15y ago
And a pretty neat site with parchment set up and hosting things: http://playfic.com http://playfic.com

zserge 15y ago

Talking about text adventures, the INSTEAD project is worth trying. It's a simple text adventure game engine written in Lua and ported to many platforms, including Android. http://code.google.com/p/instead/ http://code.google.com/p/instead/ Also, it includes some really interesting games.

brianobush 15y ago
Cool, I have a text adventure idea I would like to try my hand at... however, the examples are in Russian. Hmm,..
- zserge 15y ago
  Yes, the developer is from Russia. But there's a nice english documentation as well: http://instead.syscall.ru/wiki/en/gamedev/documentation http://instead.syscall.ru/wiki/en/gamedev/documentation Plus, INSTEAD supports URQ games that have a much more simplified syntax.
  - brianobush 15y ago
    wow, that is seriously nice documentation. Thanks!

iRobot 15y ago

Text adventures rocked until dungeon master came along and nuked the genre. They may be nice to code, but life's too short and I would not play one again.

ivan_ah 15y ago

Very cool. I have never played text adventures on a computer, but I like the simplicity of the idea of "connection between places". Two suggestions: (A) You add a onkeypress listeners for the arrow keys to mean: NORTH, EAST, WEST, SOUTH? (B) Add an ASCII ART version ;) Text adventures are not too far from "choose your own adventure" books.... hm... this will kick ass as an educational app. Imagine the island is full of "level spots" like in Mario World and each "spot" is one question from khan-exercises.

willvarfar 15y ago
Thanks :) I think arrow keys are a bit overloaded inside text boxes already and should be used for editing, but I would add "w" as a shortcut for "west" and "e" for "east" etc if I could travel back in time. Would also have added command-auto-completion like in IDEs. That'd stop the complaints by people who don't know to type "HELP" ;)
power 15y ago
If you're interested in text adventures and their history you should check out the documentary Get Lamp (http://www.getlamp.com http://www.getlamp.com)

jiggy2011 15y ago

I'm surprised there hasn't been more of a text adventure resurgence of late. I can't remember playing one since MUDS were cool. I don't even necessarily mean a fully text only game. What about something like a slow paced game that combined beautiful prose read by a talented voice actor with static hand drawn graphics or fully ray traced scenes. Also we have better NLP now and better voice recognition which would make things more interesting.

gmkoliver 15y ago
Text adventures (interactive fiction), and muds for that matter, are alive and well. I've been an active participant in both communities for many years so I feel like I have some perspective on it; in fact I'd say text adventures have seen a resurgence in the last few years. It's hard to say how much of that is fueled by nostalgia though.

jimmytucson 15y ago

I enjoyed this article, thanks! Playing MUDs was one of my favorite pastimes in high school and I often wonder whether text-based games will enjoy a resurgence with the many new technologies being developed. Side question... he mentions how you can't quite achieve this "room" object in Python: >you can’t turn to anonymous functions because Python doesn’t have them. You can’t use dot notation to dereference the fields inside the structure because Python uses [“key”] notation. Why couldn't you subclass an object that has an 'on_enter' method? A nice side benefit would be that you'd be able to use dot notation to refer to its attributes! class Kitchen(Location): name = 'kitchen' description = 'Your kitchen is untidy and cramped.' visits = 0 def on_enter(self): if (self.visits == 0): #first time in this room ... So far the magic of Javascript has been a bit over my head but I want to learn more. Why is this something you'd need anonymous functions to accomplish? (And why not just use Perl or some other language with them as opposed to JS?)

natep 15y ago
When I see your class definition, I think "why define a whole class for just 1 room?" because then you have to separately define and instantiate every class, an everything would effectively be a singleton (even if you didn't follow the pattern). If you can treat code as data, and concisely define an anonymous function, it saves a step. Speaking of code==data and text adventures, I'm currently working my way through the book Land of Lisp[1]. Some chapters just focus on new concepts, but most illustrate concepts through the creation of a game (except for the streams chapter, which has you write a web server). The first game is an extremely basic text adventure. You can only move around and pick up objects, but it did parse 'normal' keyboard input. Now that I'm a few chapters deeper, I'm starting to see how it could be expanded to handle different actions, etc. Another interesting approach to web-based adventure games is "Adventure Games Live". Instead of typing, you select a radio button for the action you want. Some of those games are extremely challenging (I've spent hours playing and haven't finished many of them) [1] landoflisp.com [2] http://www.rinkworks.com/adventure/ http://www.rinkworks.com/adventure/

ragmondo 15y ago

I started making a text adventure over google chat - based on app engine (not that this matters). The idea being that you could add / update / change the "world structure" as well. Oh and it could easily be an MMO as well. Anybody interested in helping me out / taking this over?