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 text) adventure game.
If you want to learn C programming, writing a text adventure in C would be a fun learning project! But aside from pedagogy there’s no real reason to write a text adventure in anything other than Inform, TADS, etc. Not only is it much easier to use one of these purpose-built languages, with Inform you get multi-platform compatibility going back to the 8-bit era for free!
Personally if I had any free time, I’d be more interested in looking at how to use a frontier LLM like llama as an integral part of a text adventure. There was something like this using GPT-2 circulating on here a while back, but it was pretty rough.
However, it’s clear that if you figured out how to precisely control the LLM so it didn’t produce crazy stuff, you could realize the dream of truly realistic NPCs in these games. Text adventures would seem to be a perfect laboratory for experimenting with this.
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 instead of stocks cuz the ascii art needed some lore to help flavor it now that gritty drugs were out
Realistically, StoryHarp might be most fun to use as an authoring tools for kids making short idiosyncratic adventures to share with friends. StoryHarp could help people practice creative writing and learn just a bit of logic to set up puzzles (without getting bogged down in more computing complexity like writing C code or even just the conceptual demands of TADS or Inform, as amazing as those tools are).
I recently added a option (inspired by "flems.io") where you can create a StoryHarp link that includes the entire world definition in the hash. For example, here is a URL for a game that just says "You are visiting the Hacker News website" when you click "look": https://storyharp.com/v3.0/#world=N4Ig7g9gTgNgJgMQJYwKYDkCGB...
Otherwise the game stores data only in the browser (not the server) which can be exported or imported as files.
While I can see how LLMs might make for more realistic interactions with text adventures, writing text adventures is its own sort of puzzle (like coding programs manually), and I am not sure adding LLMs will really make creating such adventures a much more joyful experience. But maybe it could. I agree in general though that text adventures make a great playground for experimenting with new ideas (as with StoryHarp as an experiment in bringing browser ideas from Smalltalk into interactive fiction design).
P.S. I just expanded that Hacker News story with a couple more rules so you can have more of an experience: https://storyharp.com/v3.0/#world=N4Ig7g9gTgNgJgMQJYwKYDkCGB...
Anyway, that is the sort of idiosyncratic short experiential interactive fiction I am talking about. Just spend five or ten minutes and make something that captures an emotion or a theme or a concern or an moral conundrum or whatever.
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.
I wanted to write my text adventure, but I'd offer reader to have multiple options, especially for those who are not really practical with english (includes myself ^-^).
For the creative side I would recommend trying out all kinds of things. Should your player be able to get stuck/into a dead end? Will players play once or many times. Can you "win" your game or is it more of a narrative? How do you want the player to feel!
For some more specific ideas, think about how your game branches. Branching and decisions in games are far trickier than they might appear. Too subtle and the player misses the choice entirely. Too in your face and they become boring ("kill the baby" vs "save the baby", gee I wonder which one takes me down the evil path)
Also, merely asking a question or giving a choice can influence the player. If you ask "who is the killer?" and give a list of suspects, one of them must have done it, even if the player never considered it. The question also assumes the player knows there was a murder and gives that away if they hadn't worked it out yet.
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)
https://www.inform-fiction.org/manual/DM4.pdf
Crimes Against Mimesis was a famous tract in its day. I don't know how things have moved on since then.
https://www.rickandviv.net/index.php/2004/08/18/crimes-again...
The Interactive Fiction Wiki is a nice place to start:
https://www.ifwiki.org/Main_Page
And if you search for something like "interactive fiction tips" you'll find tons of resources.
My actual aim was to write a simple text-adventure in Z80 assembly, which could run upon a CP/M system. I did achieve that, and later ported the game to the ZX Spectrum.
A few years after that I used one of the inform-compilers to recode a couple of the puzzles in the Z-machine, which would also have allowed me to run the game on a CP/M system, but to be honest by that point I'd lost interest and I never ported the whole of the game's text, and the two different endings etc.
That said my toy adventure was popular when submitted here, back in the day:
Infocom was famous for using this approach, for instance.
Does anyone know of good prior art in this space?
[1] http://www.ulisp.com/show?383X
The English (and Spanish library -grammar, object and token translations- with INFSP6) it's something else. Among Inform Beginners' Guide, with DM4.pdf you can set anything, even new grammars, or a Tetris, if you want to dwell into low-level Inform6 functions.
Inform6 gives you literal game objects and attributes for free. The most literal OOP language ever. And the generated ZMachine games/ROMs will run from a m68k Amiga to an Iphone.
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've lost too many hours to bad stdlib APIs.