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?
I Can Do That
When I have an experience that tickles my brain, I’m susceptible to believing I can recreate it on my own. Thinking back, I’m sure part of it is a certain amount of self-confidence, yet time has showed me it’s more likely caused by under-estimating the work that was put into creating the experience. This often comes up in my tinkering with computers and programming. I’ve tried many projects over an evening or weekend, then either get swamped by the prerequisites or distracted by something new. I’ve played with game engines, read snippets of textbooks, and gone through many tutorials of software to try and build a version of a program, game, or idea I saw elsewhere. Despite pretty consistent failure in a long-term sense, I’ve exposed myself to, and gained appreciation for, the specialized skills people have. In rare instances, what I’m trying to recreate aligns with the skills I’ve developed over the years.
Podcasts are a good example of this. While the podcasts I do are in no way professional, I think they’re entertaining for a certain group of people and I thoroughly enjoy recording and editing them. As I did more podcasts, I paid closer attention to the shows I listened to for new ideas and ways of crafting an episode. My favorite has been the Cortex/Upgrade annual special for the Relay FM network, where they play a Parsely in-person text adventure.
This mode of story-telling and gameplay immediately stuck. Constructing a narrative within a rigid puzzle framework the player must discover was incredibly enticing. While the creative and collaborative storytelling in a tabletop RPG can be immense fun, I immediately saw the challenge in building a standalone structure that must stand against the player while still providing enough engagement to actually be fun. I also believed I could make it myself.
Over a month or two, I wrote and played Sail Away and Homestead, then quickly realized they did not represent my strengths. I wanted to make versions of the Parsely adventures I’d heard that were set in worlds that interested me. I made those worlds, and I’m happy with them. Yet I tried too hard to create new mechanics that made the game more challenging. My lack of experience and subtlety made those changes come at the cost of the experience being fun and rewarding. While I had not made a clone of what inspired me and was definitely moving in the direction of something uniquely mine, refinement was needed.
I Can Improve
Many projects get stalled or killed because I get lost in the beginning, unsure where to go and unwilling to commit the time I believe is necessary to get the product I want. The text adventures didn’t follow that pattern. I could work on them weeks or months apart from each other, yet still use the lessons learned to substantially improve them. The more I wrote and play them, the more motivation I had to keep building them.
After my first two adventures went reasonably well, but also aware of some of the changes they needed, I wanted to push well beyond the boundaries of the adventures I’d seen. The next adventure I wrote, Coffee and Donuts, relied on a geometric map that changed during the game. It was always the same three-by-three grid of rooms, yet how they connected would adjust depending on a dial the player found. While it is a great idea that I’ll use again, everything else about the game was still overcomplicated or poorly designed. The motivation for the game was hidden away too much, and there were inane obstacles to what was already a reasonably tough concluding puzzle. I tried to mask this poor design with an amusing setting, but that was me simply not accepting that I’d done a poor job on this first pass and needed a strong revision. That revision didn’t come before playing it on OHAC, and the result was a really poor showing by the end. There were elements of a really good game there, and I was able to flex my writing style, but the puzzles needed work. It didn’t accomplish the goal of being entertaining and rewarding, so more had to be done next time.
I tried to distill the success of Coffee and Donuts while tossing out the mundane puzzles built using physical objects inside the game. Out came Recurring Nightmare, where math was the entire game, and the player had no way of knowing so. There were no ancillary puzzles built on top of a larger mechanic. Instead, I wrote a minimalist scenario where the lack of information was the only clue the player had to work with. Immediately after I finished writing the adventure, it felt right. (Of course it so happened that a few weeks later, as I posted about last week, I came up with a better name. Oh well.) In my opinion, this game ran the best out of any I’ve made. It felt good to start finding my voice and seeing gains from the thought I put into writing these over time.
This whole process has taken a little under two years, with any one text adventure taking about a day to write, and several months of sitting on the feedback of previous ones. That worked well through now. Since I’ve hit on something that meshes with my sensibilities though, I can start making more text adventures in earnest, continuing to iterate on my style and design. I want to keep focusing on relatively simple maps with a strange twist, a glaringly obvious goal in the form of a physical obstacle, and a string of logical leaps needed to get there. I want to incorporate bits of real life information, whether that’s basic mathematics or some research into a topic that interests me. In Recurring Nightmare, there was the locked bathroom and the Fibonacci sequence. I’ve since written a new adventure that follows a similar scheme: A clear obstacle shrouded by bits of context. Playing it will teach me even more about what can work in these games, and I find that encouraging.