Etsu! I'm very sorry to hear about your circumstances. I'm also very sure that you'll make the most of it. I'd personally love to see what your undivided attention can do with those ideas of yours for a P&C-game can do! Those first concepts were promising indeed

Just to let you know we haven't forgotten you, Etsu. I hope life is improving for you.

Thanks, Victor, Lum and Detritus.

I may not be in the same position than a few months ago, but I'm still working. Theoretically I could still work in SkyJunkers or other similar high resolution games, and make a lot of optimization for good if not similar results. The problem would be that my CPU complains a lot, and I don't want to kill this one too. Besides, it takes a lot to do anything, so my productivity would be awful. Unity makes my CPU to complain too. So I have been learning how to use Adventure Game Studio, which now supports multiple resolutions, and see what I can get.

Surprisingly, I have been enjoying this thing a lot, and going crazy I started working in something that you probabley are not going to be interested, but it have proved to be very fun for me: text adventures.

I don't know much about text adventures, never play any for long, but I wanted to try. (I just hate to draw, basically.) The results? I'm surprised. Without trying to emulate how parser games are supposed to work (I don't actually like the concept very much), I really like what a text interface can do. It's just too powerful, and I get instant results for my efforts.

You could even call this "SkyJunker lite" if you want, because one of my projects is a space game. (Called 'SkyJunker' just for now, whitout the 's'.) I'm also making a somehow relate underwader horror game, sort of. And I have ideas for short games as well. I will share something with you very soon (I hope). As a way to experiment and keep creative, this is proving to be very cool.

At first, I was basically making a 'Point & Click' adventure game without graphics, but that didn't work. One of the first thing I removed was the need to write 'examine this' or 'examine that' (or 'look at this or that', etc). Why you should do that? The game should know what you want to do based on the circunstances. So I simplified in that way that you just need to write the name of something, an object or topic, and get results, basically like when you use Google, and then describe actions to interact with whatever you are trying to interact with, without the need to write the object name again. You can also combine words to get better results. My discoveries (playing my own work) is that it feels, independently of the narrative, very much like making detective investigation. (Of course, I say this without any real experience making real detective work.) You actually are making deductions and improvising, something that 'regular' videogames usually fail to represent.

All right. I know that I'm not going to become famous or rich making text adventure videogames, but as an exercise before my flashy return as a 3D developer I think is pretty good, and make my life just a little easier despite of the problems. (That, and my five lovely cats, of course. )

I will come back later to tell you how things go. Please, feel free to share your thoughts regarding this new direction if you want. I have this place in my thoughts every day.

Cheers.

Etsu wrote:(That, and my five lovely cats, of course. )

--IronDerp

Etsu! I'm glad that you can pop up now and then in these parts and that you're still doing what you can and staying creative. That's important. I'm looking forward to see what you can come up with the new tools. Text or P&C games are always fun!

I'm pleased to see a new post from you, Etsu.

And I'm also happy to read of your new projects. I can't say I've experienced many text or P&C games. I vaguely remember playing Zork back in the dark ages. I enjoyed the games at the time but I'm more into the shiny, open world and gpu hungry titles nowadays. Still, I would be interested to read of your progress in these new ventures you speak of.

Just keep in touch with us.

Etsu wrote: One of the first thing I removed was the need to write 'examine this' or 'examine that' (or 'look at this or that', etc). Why you should do that? The game should know what you want to do based on the circunstances.

because the game knows purely from you saying "piggy bank" if you want to look at it, take it, break it or whatever you could want to do with it

Thanks, guys.

Cornflakes_91 wrote:because the game knows purely from you saying "piggy bank" if you want to look at it, take it, break it or whatever you could want to do with it

That could even be possible, giving the character a stronger agenda. You just 'interact' with objects and the character do the rest. However that wasn't what I was talking about necessarily. I was talking about eliminating redundancy.

When you search on Google you don't add the word 'search' before the topic. It would be redundant. You just write the name of the topic you are interested in and press SEARCH. Only when you need something in particular you may add conditionals. So the most intuitive way of doing this in a text game is that you should only need to write the name of an object or topic and press ENTER, considering it an equivalent of looking at it, because that's the most basic and obvious action.

If you want to add extra information to an object or topic, something that may require further examination, not need to use a different command. (Like when 'LOOK' and 'EXAMINE' give you a different description for example.) Just write the name of the subject and press ENTER again as you are reading the basic description. You can give new information to the player every time he or she introduces the name or description of the topic as many times as you may want, and even hide certain secret information only after the player had examined it any specific number of times or a random number or times or under certain conditions or whatever. There are many possibilities there. Easy and intuitive, as I think it should be.

If you want to interact with the object then, and only then, you should add a particular command. But even that is not needed: To make things even simpler, if you write 'MUSIC BOX' and press ENTER you will read a description of the music box, basically. If you then write 'OPEN' the character will open the music box. No need to specify what you are trying to open. However, you may write 'OPEN MUSIC BOX' at any moment if you, for example, are not reading the music box description. In other words, there is only need to be specific if it is not obvious with which object the player is trying to interact with.

The use of 'X' as a synonymous of 'EXAMINE' is an example of understanding that there is a problem but not doing anything to fix the problem. I just eliminated the need of using 'LOOK/LOOK AT/EXAMINE/X' altogether and now the problem is gone. (I would want to know if it is possible to do this in Inform 7, which is a very interesting tool. I'm not using it yet because the need for an interpreter, but still.) Of course, it would be easy to me to let those commands there in case you feel the need to use them. I just eliminated the requirement of using them, which I find extremely annoying.

We can go even further than that. I'm considering to experiment with a very basic, minimalist approach limiting the number of commands to 'USE', 'TAKE', 'MOVE' and 'TALK'. (There are two or even three there that may be redundant as well, but it may be required without any graphics.) I'm thinking something very small, a kind of 'one room/scene' situation to see how it works. However, this requires designing the game around that limitation, which could probe to be fun anyway. A game like that would be more accessible probably, but there are certain cases in which I would prefer to create a bigger number of commands, just for versatility and variety.

I repeat: Those are my findings playing my own work in this last weeks, finding what it works and what it doesn't. However, I just started playing other people's work as well recently, to see how this is supposed to work. I haven't found any interesting yet, but I will keep trying new ones. So far I keep finding 'problems' on those others games. But that's OK. That's a reason to keep doing what I'm doing I suppose.

A small update, in case someone is listening.

Since a few weeks back I have been trying Inform 7, a dedicated software to write interactive fiction. (It's the one that Emily Short and Andrew Plotkin use regularly, so it has to be good.) I love to learn new things, and this have been a lot of fun. I know that you have to learn something, like a programming language, in order to use it to your proposes, so I suppose that the regular procedure should be to learn something useful and then keep doing stuff with it. I don't know. The fact is that I actually like the process of learning itself. That makes me unstable, maybe, but sometimes I'm afraid of the day I will not have anything new to learn. I suppose that there are too many cool things in the world, so something like that should never come to happen, but still. I probably will try to learn TADS 3 next.

The difference I found relative to working with the programming language from AGS is that I7 tends a lot to simulating a world. When I first started working in this IF thing I was interested mostly in creating interactive stories, but I actually find quite fascinating the idea of creating a world which, independently of its size, it has its own rules and processes. So, in a way, working with I7 is very similar, in concept, to what Josh is doing with Limit Theory, but very different to my original approach.

There is a reason to follow this method by the way. I'm not sure way but working with Inform inspires me much more than working in any other language. For some reason I have ideas that I would never have on another programming environment, and that is a very good incentive in continuing exploring this. Besides, now that I finally got the general process, it seems that I can generate content much more quickly than before. Again, I don't know why this is the way it is, but that's my experience.

The bad side (if any) is that playing IF created with this software means that anyone wanting to play it would need an interpreter, which means that I have little control over how the game looks, including the impossibility of make you play at full screen. On the other side, I don't need to worry in finding the right fonts or if the fonts will look too big in some screens or whatever. That's up to you and the interpreter you choose to use. Additionally, I created my own "parser" system in AGS and I like it better than a regular parser. It is more easy for the game to understand the player's input, and there is less space to mistakes. I can do this in Inform as well, but that would require significant extra work. So far I take control over the parser only under specific cases, and let the parser handle the rest.

I also found the way to remove the need to use "x" or any other verb in order to examine objects, my previous concern regarding this system, and it was quite easy actually.

I don't know how many of you will be interested in playing Interactive Fiction, but at least I am highly surprised because I didn't know that this world even existed. Well, I did know, but I didn't know that it was so powerful and cool. The things you can do with it are almost unheard in other media, including traditional videogames. Obviously, I'm concerned about how difficult would be to get any economic revenue through this method in comparison with a game with cool graphics, but so far I'm more interested in the aesthetic and creative possibilities, not how much money or attention you can get from it, so I will keep going to see what happens.

Etsu wrote:A small update, in case someone is listening.

I'm still reading what you have to say, Etsu. Don't go away with the impression that you're wasting your time posting here.

So, I'm working on two games right now, one long and the other one short. (Theoretically, at least.) The first one is a fantasy game. It seems that this is not a genre that many fans of Interactive Fiction like, but whatever. It is called "The Cave", but it is not a cave exploration game. (I don't like to draw maps, so I will no force anyone to do so.) The second one is a science fiction game called "Man On The Moon". The idea is make this one short and straightforward, but is requiring a lot of coding from me right now so it may take a while to see the light of day. I chose to make it because the fantasy one will require a lot of work to make it justice, and I want to have something to show sooner than later.

I'm also playing a lot of IF to familiarize myself with what other people is doing, and reading a lot of SPAG reviews, to know what people like, so that way I'm not entering blind to this fascinating world.

Unfortunately, being these text adventures games I don't have much to show. I can talk about them, but no pics or videos are available, so I will need to make this comment short.

You dont have to make people draw maps to create an exploration game, though.

Let the game automap it or provide a topological map which automatically expands.
Where just locations/rooms and their connections are shown, not their actual physical relationships.

I don't know how to make any of that, Cornflakes.

I would like to know how Graham Nelson made the jigsaw pieces in Jigsaw. That would be very good looking as a map I think. However, so far I'm doing fine making the text clear enough to give you an idea about where you are, for example changing the room description depending of the previous room. (Telling you for example that you are coming from the west. That's easy enough.)

By the way, I'm a very bad player. I rarely manage to go anywhere, and I'm constantly stuck, unsure of what to do. More often than not, I feel blind, unsure of where my character is or how the room looks like. I'm trying to avoid that kind of problem from my own work.

I like very much the Inform programing language. Not only I don't need to write any comment (due to the fact that it's very obvious through only looking to the text what every piece of code does) but also because a rule based approach to programing is extremely fun to use. I'm all the time making new rules, and changing the default ones, without much of an effort. In that regard the manual that comes with the software is extremely wrong when it says that is not a common thing that you will need to design your own rules. As I can tell, that's a very big part of any project.

Etsu wrote:I don't know how to make any of that, Cornflakes.
.

A topological map wouldnt be very hard to do i think.
Its literally just a net of how the rooms are connected.

Literally just a bunch of labeled boxes/circles connected by lines