

Ask HN: Any intro guide to creating text-based games? - zaidf

I know next to nothing about text-based games where you rob a bank, shoplift etc. But I am interested in dabbling with it. Anyone know any guide that provides a psychological perspective of well-received text games?<p>If you've already made one, I'd be interested in chatting with you. I may have an offer you like.
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IsaacL
Try googling 'interactive fiction', which seems to be the modern term for old-
school text-games. I used to play a few text games as a teenager (I'm 20 now,
so this was only a few years ago) and there seemed to be a small but thriving
community about IF. A lot of intelligent discussion about narrative, game
design, and so on.

When you talk about the 'text-based games where you rob a bank, etc', it
sounds like you are referring to Torn, the browser game that was posted on HN
a few days ago for making its creator a millionaire. There's quite a
fundamental difference IMO between clicking buttons on a webpage and entering
pseudo-english sentences at a CLI.

I feel I can speak with a bit more authority on the first kind as over the
last few months I've been working on my own browser game, which currently has
around 600 active users (active = logged on in the last 5 days). It's not
purely text-based, as the main screen includes a 2d map showing the area
around a player. Still, a few people have said it reminds them of the old
Infocom games, which I think is pretty cool.

If you want to take a look, the game is called Shintolin
(<http://www.shintolin.co.uk>) and is set in the stone age; players craft
spears, build huts, hunt animals and so on. One of the features is that every
item and building in the game is player constructed - there are no NPCs apart
from animals, and the game's history arises naturally from the interactions
between the different villages.

Sadly it hasn't made me a millionaire, but I have learned a lot about
programming from it, especially how to organise large projects (I had to scrap
the original version of the site, after it became an unmaintainable mess of
PHP scripts). There's no Javascript or Flash involved, just plain HTML/CSS,
with a Ruby and MySQL backend.

Anyway, I mention that just to show you that the space of possible text-based
games is quite large and diverse, so you might want to look around to see what
tickles your fancy. Focusing purely on the gameplay and content without
worrying about graphics gives you a lot of freedom (though HTML makes it
fairly trivial to create a basic GUI).

One thing I've been getting into recently is roguelikes such as NetHack, which
do have graphics, but very minimal ones (usually entities are represented by
ASCII characters). As they often feature procedurally generated content and
AI, I think they could be an interesting project to work on from a CS
perspective.

~~~
zaidf
Can you drop me an email?

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chaosprophet
Whenever, I see "text-based game", I think of old school MUDs, _not_ "Mob
Wars". Being a more-than-casual-but-not-so-hardcore gamer, I find it quite
silly, that something in which all you have to do is click a button is even
considered a game.

Also, apart from a few recent games, not many text-based games have been well
received, and they likely never will be, so I suggest you try doing some
casual games in flash. You could look at lostgarden.com for some inspiration
(and also monetizing tips).

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spectre
I think it would be difficult to find a recent test-based game that could be
considered 'well received', there hasn't been much interest in text-based
games since the advent of the GUI.

It could be quite interesting to see what is possible with modern languages
and text-based applications.

~~~
thwarted
Much interest? <http://www.xyzzynews.com/> I'm sure it's a relatively small
community, but I bet it's still going strong.

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jimrandomh
You may be interested in Inform (<http://inform7.com/>), which is a language
specialized for creating interactive fiction games.

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nsfx
/Designing Virtual Worlds/ by Richard Bartle

