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Comment by serhack_ | Hacker News Reader

I was wondering: does anybody know if there are any good resources for writing a good text adventure? Any nice tips and tricks? Mainly related to the content. I guess it overlaps with "writing a good novel", but I bet there're some specific advices that can be applied to the text adventure.

I wanted to write my text adventure, but I'd offer reader to have multiple options, especially for those who are not really practical with english (includes myself ^-^).

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Aaron Reed's 50 Years of Text Games[1][2] is a fantastic journey into the history and the possibilities of text-based games. I got the physical book and was surprised to find it as engaging as a novel. Each chapter takes one year between 1971 and 2020 and picks a game from that year to discuss in depth. While it might not help with the writing per se, you might good ideas there (several of the games discussed are in the "Adventure" lineage).

[1] https://if50.substack.com/archive?sort=new

[2] https://if50.textories.com/

I can second this. I own the physical as well, has many pages going over the code used in the games being covered and why they were written that way.

This comment got me to purchase this book and bump it to the head of my reading queue. I'm about halfway through it and it's really, really good. I definitely think it can help with writing/design, by showing the breadth of possibilities and how the art has evolved.

For the technical side of things, use ink script. There's an editor, plugins and it's a mature project.

For the creative side I would recommend trying out all kinds of things. Should your player be able to get stuck/into a dead end? Will players play once or many times. Can you "win" your game or is it more of a narrative? How do you want the player to feel!

For some more specific ideas, think about how your game branches. Branching and decisions in games are far trickier than they might appear. Too subtle and the player misses the choice entirely. Too in your face and they become boring ("kill the baby" vs "save the baby", gee I wonder which one takes me down the evil path)

Also, merely asking a question or giving a choice can influence the player. If you ask "who is the killer?" and give a list of suspects, one of them must have done it, even if the player never considered it. The question also assumes the player knows there was a murder and gives that away if they hadn't worked it out yet.

Yeah, I like things like Ink a great deal. It's really easy to overcomplicate narrative design if you're not careful, but Ink (and so forth) do a good job of keeping things simple and staying out of your way.

The Inform Designer's Manual is mostly about Inform 6 programming, but has a lot of material on game design.

https://www.inform-fiction.org/manual/DM4.pdf

Crimes Against Mimesis was a famous tract in its day. I don't know how things have moved on since then.

https://www.rickandviv.net/index.php/2004/08/18/crimes-again...

Some good places to start:

- https://planet-if.com/

- https://intfiction.org/

- https://grumpygamer.com/why_adventure_games_suck/

- https://grumpygamer.com/puzzle_dependency_charts/

- https://ifarchive.org/

I've spent the last three years building a game engine specifically to do this, and currently finishing the final draft for the game story I've created to go alongside it.

Happy to share anything you'd find helpful. The big takeaway for me has been, you're going to want to graph out the impact of choices before you write the story. If you know the flow of decisions, then that gives a much clearer structure than trying to write the story first and then create branches off it. I think the reason is that it sets a much tighter scope for the writing doing it that way, whereas if you write the story and then find ways to branch it, the scope for that is functionally infinite.

Got any specific questions?

Ron Gilbert's 1989 "Why Adventure Games Suck And What We Can Do About It" https://grumpygamer.com/why_adventure_games_suck/

Text adventures are not graphical adventures. Text games don't have the linearity and constraints of a graphical one.

Compare Anchorhead, Devours, Spider and Web... with most point and click games.

Gilbert's essay wasn't limited to graphical adventure games.

As some of the other comments allude to, the term of art for text adventure is "interactive fiction".

The Interactive Fiction Wiki is a nice place to start:

https://www.ifwiki.org/Main_Page

And if you search for something like "interactive fiction tips" you'll find tons of resources.

Slightly adjacent, I like these two blog articles that show ways to think about non-linear dialogues:

https://philipphagenlocher.de/post/video-game-dialogues-and-...

(introduces an interesting and useful way to think about dialogues, in my opinion)

https://philipphagenlocher.de/post/data-aware-dialogues-for-...

(further expands on the ideas of the first blog post, automatically ensuring that some properties that might be desirable)

You can find many books on text adventures from the 1980s in the Internet Archive. The Inform manual has also quite a few tips and tricks.

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