Command languages as game user interfaces | Hacker News Reader

Command languages as game user interfaces

snellman.net

37 pointsluu4 comments

I've been designing games, mostly as a hobby but a little bit professionally, for about 30 years. And I love devising text/command interfaces for games. textual representations of the game state. Its a useful design constraint and challenge. it helps me as a designer focus more on making a game fun and interesting. as a bonus it can minimize clutter and unnecessary/accidental complexity. I bias to making game prototypes whenever I can with textual world representations and a command/response messaging-style protocol for playing and interacting with the game. With limited "free" time and a growing need to prioritize, the more bang for my buck I can get, results-wise, the better.

There's a question in the middle of that post that's easy to miss. Maybe people here have some insight on it, so I'll ask it again :-)

Are there any other digital board game conversions based on command languages? I'd love to know of any other examples than the few listed in that post. (I'm specifically interested in board games, since for those the game design is generally already fixed. For a native computer game the implementation details like this and the game design go hand in hand).

What about board games implemented on IRC? (This took me a while to connect the dots). Bohnanza, for example, http://lfowles.org/blog/2014/07/19/hacking-scrappy-bohnanza/

Most end up much simpler than your Terra Mystica implementation, because games are expected to be wrapped up realtime and logs are stored with the IRC client if anyone cares.

Many abstract strategy board games like Go, Chess, and Octi have simple command line implementations. Some clients use log replay to be able to watch the game develop and learn from it.

A number of relatively simple board games were implemented within MUDs/MUSHs/MOOs/etc. It's been ages since I played those, so I don't know if there were any good examples of complex board games implemented within them.

Interactive fiction, while not a board game as such, used command parsers and some systems used log replay (possibly for saving/restoring?).

And of course the old PBeM and prior to that PBM games, (many of which were similar to board games) used command languages. Galaxy PBeM comes to mind, but it did use stored state rather than log replay.

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