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]

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? :)