I’ve been thinking a lot about text-based games and how to write them. (By text-based I mean games where the primary medium is text and not visuals - things like 80 Days, Sorcery, the Gamebook Adventures series, Choice of Games’s games, Fallen London, etc.) Twine is a pretty popular tool in the indie scene, as well as things like Undum, Ren’py (text…ish), and ChoiceScript.
I’ve been searching through the Unity forums and found a couple of mentions of more sophisticated software that are typically used for non-text-based games, like articy:draft and ChatMapper as well.
Have any of you made, or tried to make games that are primarily text-based?
What tools did you use? How did it turn out?
Are there good tools to make this sort of game that are accessible to total beginners? If not, what do you think is missing?
Joshua McGrath made a pretty cool little asset for building text adventure games in Unity. Might interest you.
In general though, yeah text adventures are awesome, but not something that you would build in Unity if you were really taking it seriously. You’re just adding a whole lot of overhead that you don’t need.
Yes, I made a good start on recreating a text adventure I wrote as a kid on the Apple II, but in Unity.
I didn’t use any special tools; just a Canvas, some code to manage text input/output, and a more or less direct translation of the data structures I was using in the 80s.
But that Tidy Text Adventures asset looks pretty awesome — you should definitely try that!
I used to make text games, long time ago. Loved it and loved playing them but now embroiled in making terrains and models and all that stuff. Makes me nostalgic for the simpler days…sighs. I sound old. lol
The two most helpful things I can recommend are:
a) Buy and read the book “Story” by Robert McKee.
b) Watch the “ego review” playlist of yahtzee on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkkiai4nXBVL8CqfMQk4KMtKibKJUfBwZ
Together with a friend he plays through all the games he ever made and comments on some interesting aspects. I listened to almost all the videos on his channel because I found them entertaining, but I can see them to be educational as well if you are interested in more story focused games.
Twine, which you and others mentioned, is very accessible, free, and has an active community. @daterre maintains an open-source Unity plugin called UnityTwine. One nice thing about using Unity is that it’s easy to deploy to different platforms.
Twine, like articy:draft and Chat Mapper (which are both paid products if you want to be able to export), use branching trees where the player chooses options from a response menu. I think I prefer this point-and-click interaction to freeform parsers. As a relative old-timer, I played a ton of Infocom and Synapse text games. Fighting with the interface to learn that the game expected “get lamp” instead of “take lamp” was always frustrating. Even so, I used to prototype a lot of AI in text game frameworks such as TADS so I could get straight to the meat without worrying about graphics and menus.
It’s interesting that Shroud of the Avatar is using freeform text input to some degree. From what I’ve seen, reaction has been mixed.
Another gripe I have with those old text games is their love of obscure puzzles. There are a lot of great AI plugins nowadays such as Extreme AI (and also a couple of my own) that could replace those puzzles with more narratively-meaningful interactions.
If you happen to have the Dialogue System for Unity, the free Choose Your Own Adventure framework on the Dialogue System Extras page is fairly popular. People are mostly using it to create CYOAs for mobile devices.
Quite interesting. Does that mean no one here’s actually made a text game recently?
I suppose that’s what happens if you ask on a forum for a popular graphical game engine.
I enjoy the simplicity of developing a text-based game; we actually made one recently. I’m trying to find other people who’ve made them and learn more about the tools people are using these days.
Or worrying about the limitations of a real mode programming language. Writing my own parsers in QuickBASIC was fun but getting an actual game made was a constant struggle against memory constraints.
If we’re going to bring TADS into this discussion though we should also bring Inform into it. Specifically Inform 7 with it’s natural language approach to game development. Being very domain specific allows it to work very well.
Very nice. Though the document covering ZIL doesn’t seem to be quite the same as the one I have. Mine is much bigger.
That is sad. Text games and interactive fiction can be a lot of fun. I have never found a graphical game that can match my imagination. A good text description can bring vivid images, much more so than the limits in a graphical game.
Of course. And it is in space AND medieval. Plus it has any character from your imagination. Did I mention that playing it gives you a sensation of pure ecstasy? And it improves your luck with the opposite sex (or same sex, whatever you want).
You can play it anywhere, even while at work. In fact, it replaces your entire life and fills it with endless happiness.
Loved it and loved playing them but now embroiled in making terrains and models and all that stuff. Makes me nostalgic for the simpler days…sighs. I sound old. lol
