Skyrim rendered in text

I did some experimentation there - coded a turn based combat sistem and bolted on a real time combat. It's a magnitude easier than what proposed here, because you can code statefulness on the combat turns and that'll render quite fine and coherently. The only glitch that I had was at target switch (it's a 4x space themed coffee breaker) where you can see the ship smapping to the new target and that's it - but the nature if the turn sytem means I can easily code in a turn skip on target chane and tween the rotation.

but if you want a prime example, the dwarf fortress visualizers take that concept to an incredible heights.

Yea I had to mod the fuck out of Skyrim to make the combat fun, and even then... eeeh

I actually enjoyed stealth/archer as long as I didn't go too deep into the stealth tree, making me literally undetectable.

Mage got fun when I found a hotkey mod. Combined with Apocalypse spells, I could switch through a bunch of fun spells really quickly. Kind of felt like playing an Elementalist in Guild Wars 2 when I got it right.

Sword and board... never fun lol. Just running around lopping people's heads off gets old fast.

> I still play all the time and there's some truth to them all being the same. They get more and more polished on a UI level, and more realistic looking, but remain static mechanically.

I think the progress is more meta, trough merging and creation of whole new genres making them more approachable and lowering the learning curve, instead of singular technical feats or "gameplay innovations".

Some of that is enabled through the adoption of new technology, our modern flood of 3D shooters wouldn't be imaginable without the mouse having itself established as a PC peripheral first.

In the end, it's also always a question what a game strives for. If it strives to simulate some kind of reality with its own internal workings, like many RPG's do, then there won't be much room for gameplay mechanic innovation, most of it will boil down to making these realities more convincing trough gfx/sound/system interactions.

At least if you don't strive for a complete simulation and end up with something like Dwarf Fortress, where the sheer number of mechanics (for the simulations sake) ends up being part of the allure. A modern alternative to that would be something like Rimworld, which has comparable simulation but tries to package it into something way more approachable.

Thanks! Author here.

I think quite a few videogames have different levels. For example, I remember an old 1990s game called Wargasm where you could both be the general and the soldier. It was a lot of fun.

Most videogames don't go there, though, because it's more straightforward to use the game at a single "level". Even if they do have multiple levels, though, I don't think they ever go with more than 2 or 3. That would be just too confusing.

In text, though, this is natural. Even in non-interactive books, you have things like "Conan wants revenge > Conan is on his way to Stygia > Conan meets cobras > Conan is being attacked by the King Cobra > King Cobra's attack goes above Conan's head > Conan thrusts sword upward".

Agreed. I was really pleasantly surprised about how wonderful this was.

It brings me back to my years as a teen playing Graphical MUD's like The Realm Online, basically a text adventure with some wonderful pixel art and a point-and-click adventure interface UI. Made by Sierra in the late 90's, sold to Codemasters, ruined by Codemasters, and then re-sold to a private family instead of a development studio. The game slowly died thanks to a lack of even a SINGLE programmer...until recently:

If you've never played The Realm Online, I highly recommend looking into the newly formed private servers, there are two of them (Sacred Temple / MistWalkers ) with a ton of changes since the people who own it have long since abandoned the game.