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How to program a text adventure in C

helderman.github.io

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Re: How to program a text adventure in C

#41

Post by kaiokendev »

eigenhombre wrote: post #11
serhack_ wrote: post #2

I was wondering: does anybody know if there are any good resources for writing a good text adventure? Any nice tips and tricks? Mainly related to the content. I guess it overlaps with "writing a good novel", but I bet there're some specific advices that can be applied to the text adventure. I wanted to write my text adventure, but I'd offer reader to have multiple options, especially for those who are not really prac…

Aaron Reed's 50 Years of Text Games[1][2] is a fantastic journey into the history and the possibilities of text-based games. I got the physical book and was surprised to find it as engaging as a novel. Each chapter takes one year between 1971 and 2020 and picks a game from that year to discuss in depth. While it might not help with the writing per se, you might good ideas there (several of the games discussed are in…

I can second this. I own the physical as well, has many pages going over the code used in the games being covered and why they were written that way.

Re: How to program a text adventure in C

#42

Post by adelineJoOs »

serhack_ wrote: post #2

I was wondering: does anybody know if there are any good resources for writing a good text adventure? Any nice tips and tricks? Mainly related to the content. I guess it overlaps with "writing a good novel", but I bet there're some specific advices that can be applied to the text adventure. I wanted to write my text adventure, but I'd offer reader to have multiple options, especially for those who are not really prac…

Slightly adjacent, I like these two blog articles that show ways to think about non-linear dialogues:

https://philipphagenlocher.de/post/video-game-dialogues-and-...

(introduces an interesting and useful way to think about dialogues, in my opinion)

https://philipphagenlocher.de/post/data-aware-dialogues-for-...

(further expands on the ideas of the first blog post, automatically ensuring that some properties that might be desirable)

Re: How to program a text adventure in C

#43

Post by anthk »

cut3 wrote: post #35
dmbaggett wrote: post #23

Many years ago (circa 1993) I ported the original Colossal Cave adventure by Crowther and Woods to TADS, a language created by Mike Roberts specifically for authoring text adventures. (Colossal Cave just came up recently here.) https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=c896g2rtsope497w Graham Nelson ported my port to his Inform language, and Inform is probably your best choice if what you actually want to do is write a (plain tex…

cave is the first game i remember feeling immersed in. it was so good. its awesome you ported it! Im playing with an LLM to remake drug wars. i pretty quickly changed it to more of a spiritual successor because i wanted to add more features and then had a hard time with them and the drug mechanic so i switched to financial trading and that made more sense. the i changed it to crypto coins in a dystopian future instea…

Just get dopewars

Re: How to program a text adventure in C

#44

Post by anthk »

jhbadger wrote: post #29
anthk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>8 bit with Puny Inform6 or limiting Inform6, yes. If not, it's suicidal, even for v3 games. But, from Amiga and Atari machines, most v5 and v8 games if not all will run great.

You would probably do better on 8-bits by using ZIL which is actually feasible these days thanks to ZILF (and the leaked ZIL source code of the original Infocom games to look at).

Puny Inform it's good enough.

Re: How to program a text adventure in C

#45

Post by trivo »

nine_k wrote: post #36

Didn't read the article, but my first reaction to "How to program a text adventure in C" is to write a language / tool in C, and then use it to program the actual game much faster and safer. A Lisp-like a or a Lua-like language would both be relatively easy to implement. Infocom was famous for using this approach, for instance.

LucasArts, too, with their SCUMM system.

Re: How to program a text adventure in C

#46

Post by AndrewStephens »

I think for a lot of people here, the hard part of writing an adventure is not writing the code but coming up with a compelling game with an interesting story and readable text. My advice is that if you want to actually end up with an adventure game that people can actually play, just pick an existing authoring system that looks like it will do sort-of what you want and start writing.

I speak from experience when I say if you start by writing the engine then you will quickly become side-tracked with technical issues and never get your game done.

I can recommend ink if you want a choice-based game. It is super easy to get started and the language lends itself to extension if you find it doesn't do what you need out of the box.

Re: How to program a text adventure in C

#47

Post by johnbellone »

I wrote a few MUDs in late 90s and early 00s.

LLMs would definitely make a more dynamic and lively world for NPCs. I can even see a place for dynamic quest building. But it isn’t going to produce a full world without a significant amount of prompting.

I do see how it can help write a lot of boilerplate (item descriptions, back stories, etc). A big thing I always wanted is memory and we worked a long time on it for tracking logic (footprints, hunting). Conversational memory is probably single biggest thing that excites me.

Re: How to program a text adventure in C

#48

Post by johnbellone »

zabzonk wrote: post #10

I honestly think that writing an adventure can be best done by first creating an adventure-writing DSL (in C, if you like). A few observations on the C code (I didn't read all of it): - please, no strtok - a little more concentration on the UI, for example not using strcmp to test inputs - make all preprocessor definitions be uppercase - those conditional operators confused the hell out of me - just use if/else

I am going to have nightmares from 30 years ago about writing an ANSI color parser. Or text serialization to hand jammed file formats.

Re: How to program a text adventure in C

#49

Post by k1rcher »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #46

I think for a lot of people here, the hard part of writing an adventure is not writing the code but coming up with a compelling game with an interesting story and readable text. My advice is that if you want to actually end up with an adventure game that people can actually play, just pick an existing authoring system that looks like it will do sort-of what you want and start writing. I speak from experience when I s…

What are some existing authoring systems that exist for this sort of thing? I know Ren’Py exists for visual novels
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