NaNoWriMo Text Adventures

[squirmelia]

NaNoWriMo starts soon, and as I've been reading Twisty Little Passages, I'm vaguely contemplating writing some kind of interactive fiction/text adventure type thing for it.

[Poll #1474777]

Comments

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Oh, there is Interactive Fiction Writing Month in February:
http://www.instamatique.com/if/

Maybe I should stick to writing a normal novel in November.

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

Hunt the wumpus, colossal cave, the hobbit, HHGTG, Terrormolinos, Sphinx Adventure, Twin Kingdom Valley, Wychwood, Leather goddesses of phobos, Wheel of Fortune and a load more I can't even remember. I used to write them as well.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_text-based_computer_games

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Any tips for writing them?

If I do attempt to write one, I probably will end up not letting anyone play it anyway, given I don't tend to let anyone read my NaNoWriMo novels. :)

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

These days there are plenty of programs (like the old "graphic adventure creator") to help you with them; for an old style text adventure I'd write a little background and some ideas, then draw up rooms and link them, then decide puzzles and add in monsters afterwards as needed.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

I suppose to reach 50,000 words, the rooms might need lengthy descriptions? Or maybe there will just be a lot of rooms. Hmm. I haven't really concluded how I'll make it count yet.

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

You're going for more of a "Choose your own adventure" sort of thing here really, by the sounds of it, like "Warlock of firetop mountain" etc?

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Don't really want it to be choose your own adventure. Maybe I'll just write lengthy help files or something. I guess I will just see how it goes, and find some way to up the word count!

[kevandotorg.livejournal.com]

Inform 7 is good, if you haven't picked a language to write in yet. It's ostensibly a natural language parser, so the actual code you write looks like this:-

The office is south of the corridor. "You are in a small, badly-lit office." In the office is a table. On the table is an apple. The apple is edible. The description of the apple is "A glossy red apple."

It can be very finicky about the correct way to phrase your code (although that's quite a nice irony, making it feel a bit like playing a text adventure in order to create one), but the manual is full of neat little examples that you can drop into your code and play around with.

In terms of word counts, I think there's an option somewhere to dump all possible printable text into a file (primarily so that you can hand it to a proof-reader who can check your writing without having to play through every single branch of the entire game). But counting the natural language code is probably fair enough. Inform 7 code is actually quite enjoyable to read uncompiled.

[janieluk.livejournal.com]

Seconded on this. The main alternative, TADS 3, is a more standard programming language, but enjoys far less support than Inform, which produces Z-code (i.e. Infocom adventure language) games or Blorb files. alextiefling has more experience than me in using Inform, although I've done some simple stuff.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I think I'll start off with trying Inform and then if I don't get on with it very well, will try TADS then.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

You got there before me.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Not picked anything yet. Was almost tempted to code it myself, but that is a bad idea and I'd then just spend all the time fiddling with the code and avoiding writing any content.

I have finished reading Twisty Little Passages now and it also mentioned, among other things, Inform and TADs, as being good, so shall look at those.

Thanks for the suggestion. I shall start by looking at Inform 7 then, I think. :)

[kevandotorg.livejournal.com]

Give me a shout if you want any pointers or tech support.

[albatros.livejournal.com]

I'm sure there are kits out there that allow you to write them - I've not looked though (and would be happy to see one!)

I had a go (1985-ish) on my Amstrad CPC in Basic, and wrote a 60+ location adventure with a parser that could do up to 4-word constructs and object interactions - though not as clever as it could be (by putting all events in data files), I coded the logic directly and got the result I wanted.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

There do seem to be kits, yeah!

Have you played your game recently? :)

[damerell.livejournal.com]

How could I forget Colossal in my random sample?

I'm not sure I'd count Wumpus. Sure, it has the same interface, but it isn't tied to that interface in the same way most text adventures are, and it's a procedual-content game intended to be replayed repeatedly...

Damn you!

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

While looking up Magnetic Scrolls games, I found them all online (http://msmemorial.if-legends.org/magnetic.htm). *shakes fist*

Re: Damn you!

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Heh, yeah, the problem with reading Twisty Little Passages was that it made me want to play lots of games!

[tonight-we-fly.livejournal.com]

Er, sorry to be old, but what's a text adventure?

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

I'm confused. You're "old" (same age as me) and don't know text adventures? The most famous ones are most likely the ones by Infocom (Zork, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy etc.).
As the name suggests, the are text based. It starts off with a short description of where you are and you explore by typing commands (inventory, north, south, east, west, examine, get/take/pick up, use etc. the more complex the parser the more commands are available).

[tonight-we-fly.livejournal.com]

Ah, computer games! Why didn't you say? Thanks, I can fill in the poll now...

[kiss-me-quick.livejournal.com]

Do you mean like Choose Your Own Adventure?

[rosyatrandom.livejournal.com]

No, no, like Fighting Fantasy! (It's why I always feel like I've won when I get to page 400 in a book)

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

A bit more complicated.. See karohemd's description above. :)

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Choose Your Own Adventure style, or a bit more complex?

[nickmurdoch.livejournal.com]

I haven't got enough room in the form to reply properly, and it looks like it didn't save my submission anyway, so here's my answers:

* I can't remember any specifically, apart from L (see below), although I've half-written a few in the past :)

* L - A Mathemagical Adventure (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L_-_A_Mathemagical_Adventure) - I first played this at school in Year 6 on the classroom's BBC Micro with classmates, and that inspired me to learn my first programming language the next year (BASIC). Unfortunately I only ever knew the game as simply 'L' until recently, when I grabbed a copy of it and a BBC Micro emulator and played it all the way through. They've re-released it as a Windows application now, still text based I believe, for this generation of schoolchildren. :)

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

I have suddenly remembered that I half-wrote some when I was at school also! I got bored of writing them pretty quickly though. I can't even remember what they were about though or even what language they were in. I remember more sitting there in class, writing bits of code on paper, when I should have been paying attention.

[nickmurdoch.livejournal.com]

Ooh, on paper? Hardcore! I think the main problem with writing a text adventure is that once the framework of moving between rooms and picking up objects is done, actually inputting all the rooms and their objects quickly becomes tedious!

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

I must have been very bored in class to write them out on paper!

[invisible-al.livejournal.com]

Oh god I played that through the whole of one summer at the activities that my school was running. Took me and the teaching assistant weeks to finish it :).

[fridgemagnet.livejournal.com]

I thought about this last year, as I toy with writing IF a lot, mostly in Inform. I still think it would be an interesting idea but I'm not sure I would use the standard text adventure format, just because it makes it very hard to get the word count; you're having to think all the time about the relationship between all of your descriptions and the objects that they represent, and code them too. Unless it's a very boring piece of IF.

One thing I *might* suggest, though, is a more choose-your-own-adventure style of IF, along the lines of Japanese "dating sim" style RPGs - I did some research on the systems for those recently. Technically known as "visual novels". There is a package called Ren'Py (http://www.renpy.org/wiki/renpy/Home_Page) which is very straightforward to write in, and while it assumes you'll want to have graphics involved, you don't have to.

I think this would make it a lot easier to get the word count down as you can effectively write a standard novel and put a bit of plot branching in it. Some people write "kinetic novels" in the format which aren't interactive at all.

[fridgemagnet.livejournal.com]

in fact if you don't do this, I might, or even if you do

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

You definitely should!

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, I had a look at visual novels recently. I quite like the idea of them. Maybe I could do a combination of things - a text adventure, a visual novel, and a more standard novel type bit (apparently text adventures sometimes come with books), depending how my word count is going? 555 words of each a day wouldn't be too bad, and I don't care too much about it all being strictly the same novel.

Ren'Py looks useful.. thanks for the suggestion!

[kludge.livejournal.com]

If you have not played violet, do. It is motherfucking awesome.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

"Calm down. All you have to do is write a thousand words and everything will be fine. And you have all day, except it's already noon. [blurb from IF Comp 2008]"

Ha, yes, I think I should play it. :)

[damerell.livejournal.com]

Wait, how do _you_ know each other?

[kludge.livejournal.com]

squirmelia was at Southampton at the same time as fides. She kindly took me to Flickr and NaNoWriMo meetings one day when I was at a hopeless loose end and would otherwise have been a stay-at-home mope.

[lokicarbis.livejournal.com]

Oh, if we're including more choose your own adventure stuff, I should also have included Kim Newman's "Life's Lottery" from a few years back. And of course, there's that one I wrote a couple of months ago.

[notlosers.livejournal.com]

This is genius. I've been following Emily Short (http://emshort.wordpress.com/) lately, quietly getting inspired to do something similar, but I hadn't considered doing it for NaNo.

What would you write it in? I don't think I've got the patience to write my own parser; there seem to be a couple of choices out there, but none look wholly satisfactory. I'd want the end result to be fully playable in a browser.

[kevandotorg.livejournal.com]

It was years overdue, but you can now easily play any .z5 Inform adventure online through Parchment (http://code.google.com/p/parchment/). (There are also some Java (http://zmpp.sourceforge.net/) and Flash (http://www.bespokerealities.com/Flaxo.html) interpreters out there, if you want something a bit swisher to embed on your website.)

[notlosers.livejournal.com]

That's very cool indeed. Thanks! Now I just have to go and learn Inform :)

dumb question time JOdi

[bickichick.livejournal.com]

what is a text adventure?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction
like LInk & Zelda for Nintendo in teh late 80's early 90's and I think 20'000 leagues under the sea for a TRS 80 in the late 70's/ way early 80's
I have read choose your own adventures those were grand! and back I picked up 2 Doctor WHo choose your own adventures @ gift shop when I went to the Doctor HWo exhibit @ Earl's court I am very sure I told you and very sure that I showed you look what I found weee

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

How did your interactive fiction work out in the end? Is it something we can play now?