I was just wondering what some of the favorite programs for authoring text adventures are. My favorite is an old program called "World Builder" but unfortunately it is only available for the Macintosh. You can find info about World Builder at: http://we.got.net/~mapman/wb/
Another favorite of mine is Adrift which can be found at:
http://www.adrift.org.uk/
I use basic for text games
I coded my first text adventure in QBasic. It was 9 rooms of pure goodness called "Lost in the Woods," and it was a great help with my programming skills. I wish I still had the thing.
I like TADS (http://teladesign.com/tads/). In fact, I was going to settle for making my game a text adventure in TADS before I discovered AGS.
Yeah, ADRIFT is probably the best option right now. Once there was something AMAZING called SUDS, but it's as good as dead, and the latest installement introduced a never-before-seen bug in a very stable program... said bug was never removed. Ah, well...
...another amazing, but buggy program is FIGMENT. Give it a go, play the test game, it's unlike anything you've ever seen.
Or, try ADVENT, if you can find it on the net. EXTREMELY easy to use, and yet deceptively powerful.
Or, the Novel Construction Kit, or something - browse through underdogs, youi'll find this one. It's very appealing, graphically, but it's also very limiting.
Or, StoryHarp - very flexible, AND allows you to play with voice commands, and such. Well looking into.
Or, of course, the classics, Inform and Tads.
Or there's CAT - Creative Adventure Toolkit. Very multimedia, but a bit limited. Still fun, though.
...that enough for you? ;) For more, check out Ambrosine's resource page, which you can find in www.agsforums.com/aclinks.htm. Or something.
INFORM is possibly the best tool for interactive fiction, and CURSES, the game inform was made for, is surely one of the most suspending, entertaining, hilarious, cool, complicated (whew, i run out of adjectives) games ever!
technically i'm here and using AGS because i was infected with the Infocom games, and later Inform...
I used TADS back in college, but never created anything worth showing. TADS and Inform were the giants in IF-creation world, but it seems that most folks use Inform now.
I was also hookd on Infocom way back when. Floyd rocked.
Quote from: Dave Gilbert on Wed 16/06/2004 14:29:24
TADS and Inform were the giants in IF-creation world, but it seems that most folks use Inform now.
I'd say they're about equal. Inform is going strong (and is the one I've dabbled with - the documentation is excellent!), but with the upcoming TADS3, TADS is better than ever.
Either of those two is a good choice. Using another may be less wise. Google the usenet groups rec.games.int-fiction and rec.arts.int-fiction if you want to know why. It always tends to get discussed in reviews of games created for the annual IF Competition. (Reading those reviews are a good idea for anyone wanting to write text adventures, btw.)
OpenOffice.org serves all of my adventures in the land of digital text.
Used to create games in AGT (Advrnture Games Toolkit) - in fact, I made my first complete adventure game in this system. Later on I found it's possibilities insufficient. Are there any other users - or former users - of AGT in the forums?
I tried it, once, but then I found SUDS and then ADRIFT.
http://www.ambrosine.com/resource.html
Try this site, its got loads of game creation stuff on it, AGS gets a "Very nice" in its description.
Understatement of the century...
lol