How To Make Your Own Text Adventure On A Computer (Python) | Hacker News Reader

How To Make Your Own Text Adventure On A Computer (Python)

bluzeandmuse.com

76 pointsdanso12 comments

Ooh, text adventures! Some suggestions:

If you haven't played any before, your first question may be: Why would I play a game made up just out of text? The IFComp is a good place to start. It really helps to what really talented people can do with the medium. Here are two worth playing:

1) Taco Fiction (http://ifcomp.org/comp11/play.php?id=201) and

2) Violet (http://jayisgames.com/games/violet/), both previous winners.

Inform7 is a very widely used tool for making IF now (http://inform7.com/); I haven't played with it much, but from what I've seen, it does some really great stuff. It's a good way to get started writing your own games.

Full disclosure: My current project is a way to make CYOA from the browser. (http://adventurecow.com)

There are many DSLs for just this purpose that almost always should be preferred to a general purpose language like python. http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/Inform_7 is the most commonly recommended.

But there are many others: http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/Category:Authoring_system

I wrote a little game engine for the purpose of LPTHW... went a bit beyond what was required. The Inform 7 guide was a great tool to help. It probably is true that if you want to actually create a game that would be the way to go, it appears full featured enough to port just about any game out there.

That said, if you want to understand how such an engine works, it was alot of fun creating something in Python.

Playfic is another terrific tool for doing this. http://playfic.com/

It's a community for making and sharing interactive fiction (aka "text adventures") entirely from your browser, using a crazy-ass "natural language"-inspired language called Inform 7.

Some stuff is broken and missing, lots of rough edges.

I love text adventures (P&C, too) and I always enjoy using them for teaching purposes. If anyone is interested in picking up Prolog anytime soon, I really enjoyed this tutorial: http://www.amzi.com/AdventureInProlog/advtop.php

I wrote a cool iOS Text Adventure game framework for anyone interested, I was thinking of porting it to ruby motion but the niche I was going for ( learn to program ) probably don't have the cash for a Ruby Motion license.

http://wibblequest.com

The return of Choose Your Own Adventure would be most welcome as well

A very interesting read.

Relevant: I once built a very simple text adventure engine in C, in a few hours for a /r/dailyprogrammer challenge: https://github.com/tech-no-crat/Cadventure-txt

Hmmm, maybe it's time for something like LambdaMOO[1] to get all cloudified...

Done carefully, I'm sure it could all run on Node.js

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LambdaMOO

I think a better example for a text adventure would be Advent or Zork... Old, But very detailed, complex, and user-friendly.

Join torilmud.org on port 9999 using telnet.

Their community is awesome!

wow looks like this was written by a 12 year old, I'm impressed.

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