We’ve just completed and released our newest tool: “Tidy Text Adventures” - an editor extension for building text-based adventure games (think Zork, Humbug etc) with zero coding requirement (of course, you’re free to extend it as much as you like).
Features:
-No coding required, just type-and-click-and-press-play.
-Scheduled backup system integrated into the tool. Sleep a little more soundly.
-Multiple keywords for every action / item / room. Results in a nice, organic language feel
-Full working example adventure included (The Quest to make me my Morning Coffee).
-Full source included - people seem to love that.
Enjoy!
I got a huge kick out of creating the tool. Hopefully a few people get a huge kick out of using it.
I just saw the video and think i will buy it some times but i also have some suggestions and questions.
It would be great if i can use different languages for the same game so i can at first make the game in german and then translate it to english and other languages. This way i can deliver the game to my customers one time and the player choose his language that he likes best.
It would be good if i can use some textures above my text so that i can show i.e. some kind of asci art to the players or give them some hints inside a picture for what he also can search/look for or what he can use …
Will this run on the ipad now or in an update?
If so is there or will you support the keyboard from the ipad?
If this will work smoothe on the ipad and the two features above will be included i will buy in a second
Definitely - actually you should be able to build the example project direct to your iPad / iPhone / Android and it will work with the keyboard, etc.
Multi-language support
Oh man, that’s a very interesting point. I’ll have to meditate on it. The funny thing is - I designed the tool itself to be easy to localise (you’ll notice all of the help, titles, button labels etc. come from a text file) but I didn’t think of it so much for the game itself. I’ll put my designing hat on!
Including textures for rooms / items
I can definitely do that. I’m actually aiming to do this for all elements and evolve the tool into a “Visual Novel” styled tool.
Strange! The UI elements themselves are just the default Unity GUI elements - which should prompt the keyboard to appear. I’ll do some investigation and see what the dealio is.
Ah - the text size would definitely be small, I realised this last night - all of the UI is styled from a single GUISkin (you can find it in the project) so feel free to tweak as much as you like, you can up the text size, change the fonts and colors etc - anything you like.
Does everybody dig the demo font? I was psyched to find it - I swear it was almost exactly the same font from the old Sierra games (Space Quest, Police Quest).
Man, I was a huge fan of MUDs too. I was actually thinking (while I was making the tool) how great it would be to get one of these text-based, MUD-styled games for mobile. Something with the same chatting and socialisation you would get in the olden days.
Google App Engine + Unity - I think it can be done!
(So many ideas in the world, so little time to do them all)
I know what you mean about having to many ideas. I have been working on some networking code for my game and when I had chat and account creation finished, I was really tempted. I thought about making a full blown MUD with some 3D art mixed in to give some visuals.
Back when dialup came out I had jumped on several MUDs. Then Simutronics releases some killer games and Aol went unlimited. I sunk many hours into those games…
Maybe you could include the free “ngui” asset in this and then i/we can use the “platform resizer” asset too and so it could be a solution for multiresolutions and different aspect ratios?
Or how do you think this can be used to make a game for different resolutions?
Oh good question. I’ll have to put my thinking cap on for this one.
I’ve designed the way the output works to be fully modifiable - so do feel free to plug it into whichever GUI system takes your fancy (all of the source is included and documented for this). The tool just passes the GUI (TTA_UI.cs I think) a list of strings with a type (e.g: “Look”) and you can style it however you like on a code-level.
I’ll take a look at NGUI’s platform resizer - I wasn’t actually aware they had a platform resizer asset, very interesting!
Question. Would it be possible to make that the text does not appear at once, more like letter for letter, or word by word like on old pc’s and with a little beep for each letter (seen Wargames Movie?).
Man - you’ve touched on my absolute favourite thing. We use that ‘text-printing’ Pokemon-style effect for every game we make.
That’s definitely possible. At present the system (see TTA_UI.cs) returns a collection of responses after the user types say: “Look”.
It looks like:
“You are in the garden. It is wonderful”, TTA_Response.Look, “To the north you see the manor”, TTA_Response.Direction
And so forth - and just iterates through them and throws them up in the GUI.
So instead, we could return the response and increment a master ticker during Update() to decide which letter we are currently up to, and just print up until that point.
I’ll pop it in as a tick-box in the next update. I like your style!
Such tick-box option would be awesome. Sadly iam more a designer than a programmer. Could you implement a way to include a sound effect aswell to the typewriter effect?
It looks fantastic mate, It’s an awesome tool for writers and starters interested in creating an interactive story without the need of diving into programming and game development.
I’ll make sure to recommend it to those!
(Hell, I’m even tempted to create a TBA myself, just for the sake of it!)
I’ve been looking at German character support (at the recommendation of @RandAlThor) with Tidy Text Adventures - and the conclusions are:
The save format and tool itself supports these characters out-of-the-box (so go out there and get your Umlaut on!)
The font that comes with the Example project does not support these characters, however - so they will appear as other characters.
The default font that comes with Unity (Arial) does support these characters, so if you navigate to the GUISkin (ExampleSkin) you can change the Custom Styles fonts to Arial and you will be able to see these characters.
All of the styling is handled by this GUISkin - so if you need these characters and are feeling more fancy than Arial - grab yourself a font that contains these characters and set it as your font in ExampleSkin (we use Urban Fonts for free fonts)
I’m hoping people get a kick out of the tool. It’s a strange, liberating feeling to work on a purely text-based, discrete time-step game after working with 3D graphics and animation and real-time gameplay.
