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Skyrim rendered in text

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Re: Skyrim rendered in text

#91

Post by andreareina »

> It’s easy to come up with “You hit orc for 15 HP”. It’s much harder to come up with many versions of “your blade misses the orc”.

Dwarf Fortress has epic fight descriptions. Weapons getting stuck, severed body parts, grabbing said severed body parts and bashing the opponent with them... it does verge on too much detail though. There's also no concept of HP, deaths occur through e.g. bleeding out, organ failure, etc.

I don't think it's too much of a problem to be somewhat repetitive with the miss; if you're missing enough that the repetitiveness is getting to you, you're probably doing something wrong. You can also borrow from the pen and paper games and have critical misses with adverse effects -- overbalance, enemy counters, etc.

Re: Skyrim rendered in text

#92

Post by grrowl »

Working on a very similar problem, although multiplayer. Really really cool to follow someone's trial and error at this level of detail, with thought process and everything.

Very excited for the "next generation" of Interactive Fiction games, and the actual game is very well polished in every regard. Great work.

Re: Skyrim rendered in text

#93

Post by filiph »

smnscu wrote: post #82
Mizza wrote: post #64

The game itself is here: https://egamebook.com/vermin/v/latest/ I just played a round while I was on the train - it's _really_ good! Not only the play, but even the presentation of "loading" the next part of the game below the current text, as if it were any other book, is perfect for playing on mobile. I think this could really open up a whole new genre. Personally, I'd love to have a variant of this that I could in…

Just going through the game and I really enjoy it! This is absolutely my cup of tea, despite not being much into D&D. This guy curates an amazing set of playlists for D&D backgrounds, I had fun syncing them with what was happening in the game: https://open.spotify.com/user/bezoing edit: finished moments after writing the comment. I want more of this! Do you mind setting up a mailing list if you don't have one? SPOILE…

Thanks! Yes, there is a low traffic mailing list. On mobile so can't share the link but if you open the game again and click the Info button, it's there.

Re: Skyrim rendered in text

#94

Post by kilburn »

This is very impressive, and left me longing for more!

I'm not sure this is the direction you want to take, but I'll throw the idea in anyway. The format seems perfect to allow for user-made extensions:

- Content creation requires lots of work, but the kind of work that many are able to pull of, unlike videogame-like artwork.

- Being web-based, it should be possible to just link to new content: no need for downloads, plugins, etc.

Combining these two, you could pull off a kind of "wikipedia-like" game. I'm envisioning a game where there is a "known world" (where you enter initially). This would be your content. At the edges, you can venture into the uncharted parts of the world (link to people-contributed content/worlds/adventures). These outward links could be randomized among user-submitted worlds. If some of those worlds becomes so good you want to officially sanction it, you can then announce it as "charted" and incorporate it to the known world, with a permanent non-random entry point.

In my head, this would be very good because it would let you focus on the mechanic possibilities (which you seem to enjoy the most), freeing you from the content creation task while still building interesting game(s).

Re: Skyrim rendered in text

#95

Post by hdhzy »

kbenson wrote: post #89
Mizza wrote: post #64

The game itself is here: https://egamebook.com/vermin/v/latest/ I just played a round while I was on the train - it's _really_ good! Not only the play, but even the presentation of "loading" the next part of the game below the current text, as if it were any other book, is perfect for playing on mobile. I think this could really open up a whole new genre. Personally, I'd love to have a variant of this that I could in…

It sounds like what you are looking for is something like Steve Jackon's Sorcery series, but adapted for a computer. If so, you're in luck! It's available for Android[1] and iOS[2]. If you do like it, there's a few sequels as well. Edit: I see StavrosK beat me to it by a few hours... 1: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inkle.sorc... 2: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sorcery/id627879091?mt=8

Sorcery is mentioned in the article. And I agree, it's an excellent game series.

Re: Skyrim rendered in text

#96

Post by hdhzy »

mrec wrote: post #84
filiph wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love King of Dragon Pass! It was definitely an inspiration (although I found out about it only after I set out to build this whole thing) and at one point I wanted my game to be basically a king/lineage simulator with options to "zoom in". Later I figured that what works better is to have a "Conan the Barbarian / Elric / Fafhrd+Mouser simulator" that can "zoom out" to higher levels. The problem with kingdoms is tha…

> The problem with kingdoms is that spacial relations matter _a lot_, and so that's not something you want to base your gameplay on with a text game. You're rekindling my enthusiasm for this sort of thing (I gave up on Sorcery! about halfway through Book 4 when it took rewind away, and Sunless Sea after carelessly dying 20+ hours in on ironman), but I don't think I'm as focussed on just-the-text as you. The main appe…

>... through Book 4 when it took rewind away

They took the rewind but you still have multiple revivals in case you die (and you keep your items and knowledge!) similarly to going back by Lorag in Book 2 so it's not that hard.

Re: Skyrim rendered in text

#97

Post by subwayclub »

filiph wrote: post #48
le-mark wrote: post #6

And during that project, I realized that text stories are fractal. Unlinke in videogames (which need a steady update method), in text we don’t actually need to stick to a single level of abstraction. Very cool, this is one of the most original things I've read about this year. The example he gives is different levels of commands and details during combat. Zelda 2 (I think) had a similar thing going from map view to s…

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 wo…

Scope variance is actually really common in mobile games as well as RPGs and simulation. All of them share the same kind of design goal of bending time to fit a certain play session or inner/outer game loop length. More "immersive" games ignore the logistical problems of extreme detail and offer tools like time compression, but designing for accessibility bends things the other way, towards providing a spliced-up timeline where events don't have to happen in any particular order apart from one that builds up a sensible narrative.

Hence you have the existence of things like equipment screens that can be popped up mid-battle, pausing everything to let you think about how to divide up loot. And the energy model in mobile F2P, which doesn't make a lick of sense but enforces limited session length and progression. You can take this even further when you think about power up items in pretty much any game.

Re: Skyrim rendered in text

#99

Post by PostOnce »

sdfin wrote: post #83
PostOnce wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. For example, Skyrim doesn't do much mechanically that Ultima Underworld didn't. Ultima proper did all of that from a different perspective for a long while before that, too. The Witcher 3 is my absolute favorite RPG at least since Skyri…

> it doesn't do much that's really new, that I haven't seen before in an RPG or other game. You might like the game Prey. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(2017_video_game) It does a few new things. Not too much, but has some original ideas. And the sci-fi story is quite good.

I will try it eventually and have heard good things, I'm just disappointed they didn't let Human Head finish it -- I really like their original 2006 Prey, and Rune when that was new, too.

Oh my. I just looked up Human Head on wikipedia, and while they got Prey taken off them, they're working on a Rune sequel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Head_Studios My day has just been made.

Re: Skyrim rendered in text

#100

Post by mrec »

hdhzy wrote: post #96
mrec wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with kingdoms is that spacial relations matter _a lot_, and so that's not something you want to base your gameplay on with a text game. You're rekindling my enthusiasm for this sort of thing (I gave up on Sorcery! about halfway through Book 4 when it took rewind away, and Sunless Sea after carelessly dying 20+ hours in on ironman), but I don't think I'm as focussed on just-the-text as you. The main appe…

>... through Book 4 when it took rewind away They took the rewind but you still have multiple revivals in case you die (and you keep your items and knowledge!) similarly to going back by Lorag in Book 2 so it's not that hard.

My complaint wasn't that it made it hard, it was that it made it tedious. Having to play through large stretches of the game again just to change one decision wasn't fun, and the threat of that discouraged experimentation.
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