I want each text adventure I write to have a unique flavor. Mechanics aside, the story behind it should be fresh, typically built from a single idea, and the more I write the more my mind recognizes these singular bits of inspiration. One thought or phrase is typically enough for me to build a world from: sitting down with a thought, then branching out from the initial point in whatever way my mind flows. I’m going to discuss how this process worked for each of the four text adventures I’ve written and released so far, and try to dissect what I learned in the process. In the next post, I’ll focus more on the thought process (or lack thereof) that went into developing some of the game mechanics around these ideas.
Sail Away
This was the first adventure I ever wrote, and I had a lot of aspirations. I figured I could replicate the complicated nature of the well-formed adventures I had listened to, while also adding my own mechanics to spice things up. I wanted a story of high adventure in a fanciful, exciting world. My mind leapt to a favorite movie from childhood, Treasure Planet.
It’s an animated film that retells the story of Treasure Island, except in outer space. How could you not love that? In the movie, the space ships are modeled after 18th and 19th century sailing ships, except they make use of solar “winds” and some onboard propulsion. The crew members are various species, with Long John Silver being a cyborg. Armed with the idea of pirates and robots in space, I started exploring the setting of my story.
The setting needed to be on a similar ship of multiple levels. I initially chose to keep the setting vaguely similar, having the player set out from a port on a planet into the outer reaches of space. Making that clear, without assuming knowledge of Treasure Planet, proved difficult. So I grounded myself in an Earth port that happened to be called Neptune, and made the setting a ship on the ocean with a few aftermarket modifications. Not wanting to stray too far from the source material, I chose to include a few robots as crew members.
In building the map, I needed to understand the components of a basic sailing ship. While most people have heard some of the jargon (brig, crow’s nest, poop deck, bilge, and so on) I certainly had no clue how they related. A few searches later I was able to build out a layout of the ship. Details of how they officially connected would come later, since I had yet to determine what the story was about.
The main character should be important, so it was natural to make them a captain. The robot companions could be a couple of key crew members. While the conflict was pretty natural — get the ship sailing, then win a fight against pirates — I did not give sufficient thought to all those details (but that’s a story for when we talk mechanics.) Despite these basic moves that let the adventure follow expected beats of a sailing story, something was missing.
I’d learned from other adventures that the goal of the game, and the player’s reason for being there, is often shrouded in mystery. Discovering what the starting point is can be a puzzle itself. To really drive that home, I gave the player amnesia at the start of the game. There was a ship they could explore, and that was about it. They would discover their role in the ship only after meeting their few robot companions (of varying ability) and figuring out how to access most of the rooms. Even today, I think this was a really great starting point that made for a fun adventure.
The overall idea of Sail Away is still very good, and I think has more to it that I could take advantage of. I’ll write more about how it fell apart in mechanics next time, but it established a baseline for how I could form new stories by explicitly adapting another.
Homestead
Sail Away had me feeling pretty good about the prospect of more adventures, but I wanted to take a sharp turn into a different genre. At some point, my brain latched onto the idea of taking cues from Hatchet, and writing a game where the player must survive in the woods.
In Hatchet, there are some key things the main character Brian must accomplish: Get clean water, make a fire, and figure out how to get some food. These all seemed to be reasonable expectations within a game. Writing the map was also easy. There would be woods, a river, a cave, and some rundown shack that could actually provide a few materials. The hill was added only after I determined the need for the player to escape at a particular time. I also believe this idea was strong, but I went in the wrong direction again with some mechanics and puzzles. This time I tried to maintain the integrity of the source, and did not make good decisions about what should be kept. After a disappointing ending to this one, my mind took another turn for inspiration.
Coffee and Donuts
Puzzles were the real fun behind text adventures. In a genre that is pretty deterministic, masking a puzzle in a clever way is important. I wanted to create a map inspired by a little geometry, and that was the focus of Coffee and Donuts. It was a square grid with shifting walls and doors, encouraging the player to explore from the outset.
The complicated map being a puzzle on its own, I wanted a mundane situation to surround it. Hence an intern at Pen and Paper Co. was born. I wanted this game to be more playful, like a fun-house, and wrote the description and bits of dialogue in this spirit. It was an incredibly fun game to write, and although a few puzzles went way too far, the combination of ideas was my greatest success so far. I’ll have much more to say here when it comes to mechanics and developing the puzzles I put in the game.
Recurring Nightmare
I have little memory of when the phrase Recurring Nightmare popped into my head, but I wrote it down as a text adventure idea one evening and wrote the entire game in a few hours the following day. This was perhaps the most natural progression any of the ideas had: take stereotypical nightmare scenarios, toss them in different rooms, and lay a meta-puzzle on top of it.
I don’t have any of the classic nightmares, but I am aware of them. The overall goal was to get to the bathroom, since if you don’t make it you’ll always wet the bed. From there, it made sense to start the player in a classroom in just their underwear, establishing the setting of a small school.
I knew teeth falling out is allegedly common, so that only could happen in a cafeteria. I searched a few more, and found being chased (which I definitely did experience in dreams a few times) and perpetually falling as two more. Finally, going into the classroom where everyone is staring and you’re late for a test capped it off.
I enjoyed that this concept kept the adventure out of reality; I could make up rules because the player was explicitly in a dream. That led to much cleaner mechanics, making the final product my most successful adventure yet. Since then, I’ve been trying to find ideas along a similar vein where dominoes have to fall in a obfuscated, but not complicated, fashion. The conceit should be simple and clear, with many things yet to be discovered that increase the complexity as the game goes on.
Searching for these ideas is always enjoyable, and lets me stretch my creative muscles. Throughout high school and college I fought the need to take myself too seriously, and in these text adventures I can break out of that again.