Text adventures

Is there anyone out there who would still be interested in playing a text adventure. I used to play them years ago, and had alot of fun with them, but they seem to not be made anymore. Sadly it seems now, that people seem to have the idea in their heads that everything has to have great graphics, and be 3D to be fun.

I was thinking of coding one, but I don't feel like bothering if no one is gonna play it. And with this type of game there isn't any point in playing it myself, as I would know how to complete it.

I would love to play it, but I wouldn't buy a text adventure. Assuming you were talking about freeware, I say go for it.

As for people not making text adventures anymore, google "interactive fiction"

If you make one that runs with uClinux, you'll have a good audience :)
(The PSP and NDS Linux Homebrew crowd, specifically... and many other groups of people who are porting Linux to handhelds and need something fun).

I'm sure a good text adventure running on a desktop PC would find it's place, too.


Text adventures are great!
I was playing a text adventure based on "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" a while ago... apparently the most difficult text adventure game ever made.
Linky: http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava.html

Yes, if I made one, it would be free to play, copy for friends, put on your site. Stuff like that.

Acutally want I was thinking of doing was actually making a set of easy to use tools for making a text adventure and use those tools to make an adventure at the same time. Then release the whole thing.

I think a contributing factor of the adventure game dying out was the budget software labels and also the many adventure game writing sytems.

Alternative Software were a big culprit - they constantly said they did not want adventure games written with GAC, Quill, PAW, etc - yet they constantly published them. The budget labels were pumping out so many games that all played similar (because they were written with authoring systems).

I worked hard at trying to match the big boys - Beam Software, Magnetic Scrolls, Level 9, etc to find the market had gone.

However, all turned out well. The industry discovered the path of games like Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder which led us to the likes of Morrowind and Gothic. This was a new journey for me - suddenly, I went off adventure games and wanted to do something like Eye of the Beholder. Then along came "Carmack" and spoilt things.

However, all turned out well, when Daggerfall Larged onto the scene.

Soon (next month) I will be relishing in Oblivion.

Here's a good list of some text-adventures (some are recent, some are not):
http://www.wurb.com/if/game

Making a really advanced text adventure is really not difficult at all when you use a specialized programming language for the job, like TADS or Inform. I've made a few text adventures with TADS and Inform, and it's actually very fun, because all the complex details like parsing, object manipulation, room descriptions, etc. is done by the TADS (or Inform). All you have to do is define objects and their properties, and overload certain actions when necessary (if you wanted a custom "Take" message, for example).

I would reccomend TADS 3 (text adventure development system) (tads.org) for making text adventures. It's really powerful and allows you to create extremely complex text adventures easily. It can even simulate smells, sounds, and other senses. For example, if you define a Smell object, and parent it to some flowers, the flowers will "emit" the smell you describe and will show up in room descriptions automatically and intelligently. For example, if you put these flowers in a box, the room description will refer to a smell coming from somewhere, but will not specify that it is from the flowers (which is hidden in the box).

I would love to play one. I'd love to help you write one too, if you need help with that. Shoot me an e-mail.. I was working on something a while ago that might help you along. Give you some ideas I don't want to post here... Lets just say... It would extend the model of Adventure game to include some other genres.