Text Adventure Games

A long time ago, 12 years if the file timestamps are to be believed I was fiddling around a bit with making an inflation-themed text-based adventure game (or “interactive fiction” as it’s apparently called these days). I checked out the various development systems available at the time. I decided to see what I could do with TADS.

This happened shortly after I wrote An Evening with Holly. So I decided to build a little toy of a game as a gift for Holly and a test for myself. I wanted to see how difficult it was for me implement a basic inflating effect in an IF context.

The resulting game, and I do use the word quite loosely, was very simple. You play the game from Holly’s perspective. There is a ring that will give you the ability to inflate and deflate. That’s it. The only way to end the game is to overinflate, at which point you explode.

Writing regular fiction is hard enough for me. Writing interactive fiction is a whole new level. Even getting this simple game to work was a bit of an ordeal, although it would probably get much easier once I got more familiar with the process. But my adventure didn’t go much farther than that.

Every so often I get the idea to come back to it. Whenever I try out an IF language, I use that original game as a proof of concept. If I can successfully recreate the game before I get frustrated with the language and give up, then perhaps I could actually get through making a real game with it. Over the past decade, I’ve failed every time.

Most recently I tried ADRIFT5. I could probably get it to work with a bit more effort, but I’m still rather confounded as to why you can’t create an array as an object property. I could use a variable instead of a property. That works fine for this case, but it becomes far less elegant a solution if I want to build a larger game with multiple characters that inflate.

There may very well be a solution. I suspect part of the issue is that I originally wrote the game in TADS2, so all problems are solved the TADS way. TADS borrows a lot of its structure from C. I’m a programmer, so that’s familiar to me.

At any rate, I suspect the biggest obstacle ultimately won’t be the choice of language but crafting a good game design. Inflate123 and I were working on one many years ago, but the process fizzled. Perhaps someday.