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Comment by jama211 | Hacker News Reader

Every now and then I feel like making one, as I have a love for them. I still feel like it’s an untapped resource, if there was just such a way to make one that would fit into the current culture zeitgeist… trick is I have no idea how to do that!

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Arguably "Disco Elysium" is a modern text adventure.

A text adventure crossed with a point & click puzzle game in a 3D world admittedly but the vast majority of the actual game itself is contained within the text.

It's a text adventure by anything but the most hidebound traditionalist definition. The text is where all of the real action takes place; the graphics are more an illustration of that text than the reality of the game.

and illustrated text adventures have a venerable history; i still have fond memories of "twin kingdom valley" which was released back in 1983. (the graphics were necessarily crude, given the technology of the time, but surprisingly evocative)

I’d call it a point and click adventure as that’s a known genre but I see your point

That’s… kinda a good point I suppose, I see the comparison.

I wrote one in z80 assembly language, to amuse my child.

Making it with such a constrained environment, and language, made it a bit of a challenge. But the end result is that you can run it on any CP/M system you have around! (Or online.)

https://github.com/skx/lighthouse-of-doom/

I am actually in the process of writing one in Lua to amuse my child! He's not yet a very strong reader nor typist, so to begin with the story will progress just by moving around, similar to Inside the Facility[1]. This is also to help keep the parser simple – I don't really want to write a parser, but I do need to implement the basics to get an engine in my child's native language.

[1]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=stsdri5zh7a4i5my

When we played with our game I had to read a fair amount of the text, but he was able to type in the commands.

I did have to explain type "down" instead of trying to write "go down the stairs to the next floor please" which is what he initially wanted to enter.

Neat, it seems to me like Lua is a great language for text adventures.

In this case I chose Lua not for its suitability to the problem but because the computer my child has is a NetBSD machine with few things besides Lua installed on it.

Cool, so the computer is fairly locked out of social media etc, which is neat

Not even connected to the internet! Whicih is why I picked a BSD -- fairly complete on its own. We'll see how long I can keep it up. I hope to make "connecting to the internet" a temporary thing done for a specific purpose and then one disconnects.

Very cool!

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