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If you want to create an adventure game but your visual skills are lacking, I recommend looking into text adventures! There are great tools for making them thes
by kqr 9mo ago
If you want to create an adventure game but your visual skills are lacking, I recommend looking into text adventures! There are great tools for making them these days:
- Inform 7 has annoying syntax but an amazing IDE;
- Inform 6 is somewhat object oriented, has a good Emacs mode and decades of tools;
- Dialog takes the evaluation model of Inform 7 and dresses it in sensible syntax but it is a bit niche so tools are lacking;
etc.
The Wise-Woman's Dog is one of the best adventures I played in 2025: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=bor8rmyfk7w9kgqs https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=bor8rmyfk7w9kgqs
- perryprog 9mo agoFunny, I just started playing The Wise-Woman’s Dog yesterday—it really is excellent! I’d also secondly endorse Dialog. It’s a really intuitive way to think about the game world as a whole without having to worry about Inform 7’s AppleScript-esque syntax. It’s also grown quite a bit since the community started their own fork: https://github.com/Dialog-IF/dialog https://github.com/Dialog-IF/dialog
- mwigdahl 9mo agoPersonally I really enjoy the syntax of Inform 7, but tastes vary and I certainly understand not liking it. TADS 3 is another option if you prefer a more object-oriented, ALGOL-ish syntax with equivalent power. The IFComp has run for decades now. If you are interested in good adventures, running through the highly-rated games from over the years is a good idea. The IFComp website is at https://ifcomp.org/ https://ifcomp.org/
- adamrezich 9mo agoInform 7 is actually kind of fun to write once you get the hang of it. What's interesting though is, at least in my experience, LLMs are terrible at generating Inform 7 code specifically because it's so uncanny-valley-similar to English.