Anyone make text-driven games, or try to?

[Adventure Cow]

I've been thinking a lot about text-based games and how to write them. (By text-based I mean games where the primary medium is text and not visuals - things like 80 Days, Sorcery, the Gamebook Adventures series, Choice of Games's games, Fallen London, etc.) Twine is a pretty popular tool in the indie scene, as well as things like Undum, Ren'py (text...ish), and ChoiceScript.

When I searched through the Unity forums, I found a couple of mentions of more sophisticated software that are typically used for non-text-based games, like articy:draft and ChatMapper as well.

Have any of you made, or tried to make games that are primarily text-based?
What tools did you use? How did it turn out?
Are there good tools to make this sort of game that are accessible to total beginners? If not, what do you think is missing?

[Retro Wolf]

Twine! I've made a couple with it, really easy! Not so much games but interactive stories.

[Radiant]

There's a pretty big Interactive Fiction community on the internet, check them out e.g. at this wiki.

[Stupot]

I've played around with Inform7 a fair bit and Twine a little. I quite like Inform but I think Twine can probably do all that a lot more flexibly and (a lot?) more easily for a beginner.

[Azure]

There's a whole community for Interactive Fiction that's very supportive. I worked on a game called Sun Dogs as a writer and that was all  Unity ( Nic the game's designer coded it all though). Inkle the guys who did 80 days have a nice tool called Inkle Writer which I like to play around with. Inform is the most powerful I think if you want to do a room/inventory based parser game, but I do prefer stuff like Twine and Inkle for ease of use. No one's really implemented variables in a way that's easy for me to use yet though it always requires some scripting which I am bad at.
I am also experimenting with Tyrano for visual novels and I find it really nice to use.

[mkennedy]

For creating interactive fiction I would recommend ADRIFT which can be found at:
http://www.adrift.co/
You also may want to check out Quest at:
http://textadventures.co.uk/

For creating text adventures with graphics my favorite tool was "World Builder" for the Macintosh. Alas it was pretty primitive by today's standards and only supported 1 bit (black and white) color. Also all of the games created would have problems running in the Macintosh systems later than 6 I believe. Still it was one of the easiest to use.

[Adventure Cow]

There's a whole community for Interactive Fiction that's very supportive. I worked on a game called Sun Dogs as a writer and that was all  Unity ( Nic the game's designer coded it all though). Inkle the guys who did 80 days have a nice tool called Inkle Writer which I like to play around with. Inform is the most powerful I think if you want to do a room/inventory based parser game, but I do prefer stuff like Twine and Inkle for ease of use. No one's really implemented variables in a way that's easy for me to use yet though it always requires some scripting which I am bad at.
I am also experimenting with Tyrano for visual novels and I find it really nice to use.

Coolness! I just looked at Sun Dogs - never seen anything like it.

What's your main issue with variables? Are Twine/Inkle/Tyrano missing some way of manipulating them?

[Khris]

I have also tried several engines and I keep going back to Inform 6. The awesome thing about it is that it's basically a programming language, not a text adventure engine. If you want to create a text adventure, you simple include three library files (the actual engine) into your script and you have an extremely powerful parser at your disposal and you can jump right into designing your game.
Plus, the compiler produces files that can be played on pretty much any device out there with a screen and a keyboard.

[Stupot]

Yeah. And Inform 6 and 7 are very different to each other. 7 uses "natural language" instead of something that looks like an actual scripting language (although it is still a kind of scripting). For example, you type real English sentences like these (Or something like these; it's been a little while.):

The Crypt is a room "A dark and dingy crypt".
The Crypt door is south of the Crypt. It is a locked door.
The dancefloor is south of the crypt door.

And now you have a two rooms connected by a locked door.

I quite like this approach, but it's not for everyone. And as Azure mentioned, the variables are not so intuitive. Maybe I've been spoiled by AGS in that regard.

[Gurok]

The great thing about Inform 7 is you can have Inform 6 inline whenever you need it. The bad thing about Inform 7 is you often need Inform 6 code, particularly for screen manipulation and key handling.

And of course the English syntax seems to break down after a few lines. e.g.

Instead of taking the mushroom:
  if the mushroom counter is 7;
    now the mushroom counter is 0;
    say "Success. You break a mushroom stalk.";
    stop;
  otherwise;
    increase the mushroom counter by 1;
  end if.

Tell me that's not any BASIC or C-like language in disguise .

Inform is very useful for testing scenarios. I used Inform 7 to prototype my current AGS game. I did release one Inform 6 game too, about a decade ago. It's a more than capable VM for interactive fiction. The skein tools are fantastic. There are also lots of great peripheral, associated tools for development planning. I recommend Trizbort.

[Azure]

What's your main issue with variables? Are Twine/Inkle/Tyrano missing some way of manipulating them?

Most of those engines make you script it via text which I find makes me loose track, it's kind of frustrating that twine lets me branch visually with the bubbles but I can't set flags/variables that way. I remember using Games Factory as a kid which did and I miss it.
Sun dogs does look cool, Nic did a really  good job with it. It's moddable too.

[Adventure Cow]

Gurok: Haha, yeah. I never tried Inform 7 because I always thought, I know how to program, why not just do that instead?

What's your main issue with variables? Are Twine/Inkle/Tyrano missing some way of manipulating them?

Most of those engines make you script it via text which I find makes me loose track, it's kind of frustrating that twine lets me branch visually with the bubbles but I can't set flags/variables that way. I remember using Games Factory as a kid which did and I miss it.
Sun dogs does look cool, Nic did a really  good job with it. It's moddable too.

Yeah! It does seem like variables and flags might be hard to keep track of after a while. What do you do, write them down somewhere else?

[LindaBelle]

Didn`t understand what do you mean under the text based game? I thought that the game is played just in the writing form and all, no?