I’ve written several in-person text adventures modeled after Parsely games over the past couple of years. Through persistent effort, I’ve managed to improve them and recently began to notice a particular style develop. Since I’m finally pleased with where they are headed, I figured I would document my journey in writing them: Why I write them, how I find ideas, how I develop those ideas, and the actual mechanisms of making a document as reference. This whole set of posts will probably be four parts over the next month. So we start off at the beginning: Why did I start writing these, and why am I still writing these?
Continue reading “Text Adventures Part 1: Why I Write Them”Dream Sequence: A Twine Story
Twine is a wonderful editor that lets you create interactive fiction. It auto-builds a big flow chart, and has some programming paradigms that allow adding many involved paradigms that wouldn’t be possible in a Choose Your Own Adventure book, for example.
I recently took my text adventure Recurring Nightmare and rewrote it slightly as Dream Sequence, which I’m going to run as an “in person” text adventure over the computer for my company. When I did that, I decided it would also be fun to try and write it up with Twine, since it’s a fairly simple map and game.
I had to do some strange work to learn how combination locks work, but with the help of the internet I managed to get it in. The best part of Twine is that it exports as a single HTML file, making it pretty easy to post it in various places. So, you can now play through it on your own below. Enjoy. (Updated 10/24 to fix a bug.)
Text Adventure: Recurring Nightmare
A while ago I wrote my most recent text adventure, Recurring Nightmare. I think it’s my best one yet, with a clever puzzle hidden within it. It’s definitely the first I’d actually recommend other people try playing with friends.
You can listen to the play-through of it on OHAC 27.
I’ve attached the PDF of the adventure below.
Two Good Board Games
This is just to record two old games that my family very much enjoys. Both are a wonderful mix of strategy and the luck inherent to board and card games. The rules are reasonably basic, and the boards can be beautiful.
They are Cribbage and Backgammon. Cribbage is mainly a card game where you play to 121 points, but traditionally you play on a board with holes and pegs to track said points. It can be played with 2, 3, or 4 players (with two variations in the 3-player version) and is a wonderful game to teach someone starting at a young age. It teaches quick decision making, basic addition, and is just a casual, fun game to play at any point.
Backgammon requires a more involved board consisting of chips or tokens (15 per player) and two rows of 12 “slots” for them. Typically these slots are represented as triangles of alternating colors. This game uses dice as well, and is a great strategy game where you typically have many more moves than other board games focused on dice.
Update: Animal Crossing Takes Hold
This is a quick update, as I’ll be traveling over the weekend and don’t have much time to write a longer post.
In short, Animal Crossing has captured my mind. It’s a cleverly simple game that lets you focus on whatever grabs your attention. While my initial weeding endeavors have fizzled out, I’m very much invested in trying to obtain every fish and bug I can over time. Fashion and interior decoration don’t excite me overly much (I probably only have about 7 things in my house), but I’m playing the game to get to the point where I can have free reign over the island.
It’s a fun game, and I get it now.
The Last Question RPG
I mentioned in my previous post about creativity during quarantine that I was working on writing a new game. I’ve been interested in trying to write something that moved away from text adventures and went into open-world RPGs. I’ve been inspired both by the Republic Commandos game run by Mikhail on an episode of OHAC (and in-person during college), as well as the Campaign Podcast he recently got me into.
Continue reading “The Last Question RPG”Coffee and Donuts
I played my new text adventure, Coffee and Donuts, with Jack and Mikhail the other week. It didn’t end up going that well, but the process of having something end a bit poorly was a positive learning experience. There’s a lot to consider when trying to pace a game, create puzzles that are satisfying at the target level, and creating situations that are easy to engage with. I think I had some very good thoughts on this one (I’m particularly proud of the map I created), but the execution of pacing and some puzzles left a lot to be desired.
You can read a little bit more about it on the OHAC website.
And, here is the PDF of the game for anyone interested (it’s also posted on the OHAC website, but I’ve been busy with guests so I’m being a bit lazy with this post.)
Text Adventure: Homestead
In the most recent episode of OHAC, we played my newest text adventure Homestead, which broadly is about outdoor survival. We had a good time playing it, and it took twice as long as my previous adventure, Sail Away. I also learned a lot from doing it the first time to create a more reasonable set-up, and organize my document in a more logical way (at least to myself).
I’ll upload the blank PDF here (and can provide the LaTeX source file upon request); the completed version after finishing the game is also attached to the show notes of the OHAC episode.
homestead