
Skyrim rendered in text - ellinokon
https://medium.com/@filiph/skyrim-rendered-in-text-1899548ab2c4
======
superflyguy
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.

~~~
milankovic
I know your pain.. But are you talking about the Medium App? Or just viewed
with a mobile browser?

~~~
O4epegb
You can zoom in app?

~~~
milankovic
For images, yes. Don't think that you can zoom the text. At least I've not
seen it yet. (Android App)

------
Mizza
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!

~~~
kbenson
It sounds like what you are looking for is something like Steve Jackon's
Sorcery series, but adapted for a computer. If so, you're in luck! It's
available for Android[1] and iOS[2]. If you do like it, there's a few sequels
as well.

Edit: I see StavrosK beat me to it by a few hours...

1:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inkle.sorc...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inkle.sorcery1&hl=en)

2:
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sorcery/id627879091?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sorcery/id627879091?mt=8)

~~~
hdhzy
Sorcery is mentioned in the article. And I agree, it's an excellent game
series.

------
Aardwolf
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...](http://web.archive.org/web/19990219125446/http://webpages.mr.net:80/bobz/ttyquake/)

Too bad this gem is gone from the internet now, so that's an archive link :(

~~~
osaariki
For yet another kind of action game in text see Doom, the Roguelike [1], which
I've found thoroughly enjoyable.

[1] [https://drl.chaosforge.org/](https://drl.chaosforge.org/)

~~~
katastic
A long time ago I wanted to port Quake 3 to a MUD. Like literally play Longest
Yard or another map.

    
    
        "You enter a room. xxxSniperKid82xxx is in the room holding a railgun."
    

$ "Equip rocket launcher."

    
    
        "You equip the rocket launcher."
    
        "xxxSniperKid82xxx approaches you with a buzzsaw glove."
    

$ "Fire rocket launcher at xxxSniperKid82xxx"

    
    
        "You fire the rocket launcher at xxxSniperKid82xxx. It misses. You take splash damage."

------
le-mark
_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
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".

~~~
subwayclub
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.

------
pwaivers
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.

~~~
tarboreus
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.

~~~
filiph
Author here. I'm surprised (and very happy!) you were able to play through. I
know accessibility is one thing I haven't given enough attention to.

If you have specific suggestions for improvement, I'm all ears.

I'm getting feedback that as the game grows, it'll need a map. Are there any
best practices for map navigation for blind people?

~~~
davidkuhta
Not an expert in visual impairments but this discussion made me curious. It
seems like 'tactile drawings' is a related phrase/concept.

Here was a cool guide for using gimp and photoshop to produce them.
[https://wiki.vcu.edu/display/texturepalettehapticslab/Develo...](https://wiki.vcu.edu/display/texturepalettehapticslab/Developing+Tactile+Diagrams+with+Electronic+Drawing+Programs+Using+a+Validated+Texture+Palette)

~~~
euyyn
I had never thought of the need to remove perspective. Interesting!

------
8_hours_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
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
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.

------
bitL
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
Exactly what I was thinking, which sounds like an interesting project in
itself.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
Similar, but I thought maybe they had just pulled the dialogue trees,
locations, etc.

------
ratacat
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.

~~~
filiph
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
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)

------
e12e
> 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-...](https://thebutterfly.deviantart.com/art/Moria-Filthy-Street-
Urchin-109136974)

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.]

------
andreareina
> 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
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.

------
CountHackulus
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
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.

------
guard0g
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.

~~~
wavefunction
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.

------
bduerst
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/)

------
Rooster61
"...an arrow slams into the ground less than an inch from your knee."

Nice touch there :)

~~~
denisw
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)

------
AdmiralAsshat
_> 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
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.

------
kilburn
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).

------
indigochill
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).

------
lawlessone
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
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
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-
fr...](https://www.diabloii.net/blog/comments/how-diablo-evolved-from-turn-
based-to-real-time)

------
PaulHoule
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.

------
NetStrikeForce
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
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.

------
hmhrex
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.

------
brlewis
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
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.

------
grrowl
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.

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

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

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

------
Romanulus
... Why not just Dwarf Fortress?

------
atriches
Its time to stop!

------
haspok
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.

~~~
jamesrcole
> 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
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/)

~~~
sdfin
> it doesn't do much that's really new, that I haven't seen before in an RPG
> or other game.

You might like the game Prey.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(2017_video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_\(2017_video_game\))
It does a few new things. Not too much, but has some original ideas. And the
sci-fi story is quite good.

~~~
PostOnce
I will try it eventually and have heard good things, I'm just disappointed
they didn't let Human Head finish it -- I really like their original 2006
Prey, and Rune when that was new, too.

Oh my. I just looked up Human Head on wikipedia, and while they got Prey taken
off them, they're working on a Rune sequel.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Head_Studios](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Head_Studios)
My day has just been made.

