[Opinion] Increasing Mainstream Appeal (In Object/Puzzle-Centric Text Adventures)

Authoring General Design Discussions
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I’ve played one version of Adventure, but not the version called the Very Big Cave Adventure.

I’ve also played all the Infocom games except Bureaucracy and the graphical ones. I didn’t play them until a couple of years ago. I do remember inventory limits, although I appreciated the games like Spellbreaker with a carry-all.

I actually loved Adventure, and it’s in my top 10 games of all time. I think that the maze, the light source running out, and inventory management are genius in that game. I think that at the time it was written, these things were very creative, and I think that they feel right for a game about exploring an unknown, tight cave. The inventory limits make sense because the real ‘puzzle’ of the game, once you’ve seen everything, is calculating an optimal path that lets you grab everything in the required time limit. Zork used the same tools in clever ways so that things like opening up paths that let you carry bigger items felt like a huge accomplishment.

What I personally don’t like is games like ‘Here are ten treasures, lying out in the open. Pick them up and carry them back to the treasure room. Wait! You can only carry 9 items! And so you have to walk this 10-room path twice’. I saw some games like that this last year, and I feel that that is dull and uninspired. I like games that make you think, and many (if not most) recent games with inventory limits don’t use them in a way that requires any strategizing besides ‘put this down for later’. People are free to make games like that, but I’m free to dislike it, too.

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Both The Quill and the GAC (Graphic Adventure Creator) were available for the BBC. I had the AC (Adventure Creator) which was the same thing, but without the graphics, for the Acorn Electron, though I went back to writing in BASIC when I upgraded to the 128K BBC Master Compact.

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Well, now you’ve got 2,200 more games to review!

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If you understand why 1000 is not so much worse than 1001, you understand why you can have a reasonable limit…

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Opinions can differ so wildly on what is a good game… I wouldn’t recommend many of the games on Chris’ list :smiley: even though we agree on a lot of things.

Denk has been compiling quite a good list of PAWed, Quilled and GACed games. Best of The Quill, PAW and GAC - an IFDB Poll

Classic Adventurer tells the story behind some of the 1980s and 1990s games, which might flag up games of interest. http://classicadventurer.co.uk/

You can also look back through old issues of magazines like Red Herring and Adventure Probe to get a flavour of the dedicated UK adventure writing community.

I consider text adventures very different to the type of interactive fiction that you guys produce; but text adventures I liked from back in the day include…
The Dark Tower (Jack Lockerby), Agatha’s Folly (Linda Wright), Captain Kook (Paul Cardin), The Taxman Cometh (Steve Clay), Brian and the Dishonest Politician (Scott Denyer), Methyhel (Tony Collins), Jekyll and Hyde (Essential Myth), Behind Closed Doors (John Wilson), The Gordello Incident (Tom Frost), Run, Bronwynn, Run! (Larry Horsfield), Diablo! (Mark Cantrell)
…The list could go on and that’s only the very late 80s/early 90s games. They are very much products of their time, though, and some do require knowledge of adventure conventions that were commonplace back then. These games were written by a small community for a small community.

Over at CASA we have documented 800 Quilled games, almost 600 PAWed games, and over 300 GACed games. There are lots of interesting games to explore. They may not be brilliant works of “interactive fiction” but so many of them are like little time capsules, reflecting the life and thoughts of their creators.

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Golly, that’s a hard question to answer. I bought my first computer in 1981 (an Atari 800). I was already familiar with adventures from reading magazines like Creative Computing, so I bought Scott Adams’ ‘Adventureland’ on cassette. It took 15 minutes to load, so I didn’t turn the computer off until I’d solved it. As I live in Australia, it was very hard to find any software at all. I bought a few more Scott Adams’ games and got a disk drive shortly after that. Once I got a disk drive, I just bought every adventure I could get my hands on, mostly imported from the US. I also typed in adventures from books and magazines and ported adventures from other computers to the Atari. Most adventures were written in BASIC in those days, so it was pretty easy to port them. I even ported a couple to a Cyber mainframe at work. (I might have done that before I got the Atari.) The Atari had some really good illustrated adventures, mainly ported from the Apple II.

I formed an Atari users’ group in 1982, formed an Adventure Special Interest Group within that and edited its newsletter called Inside Info. We used to exchange newsletters with other user groups. As a result of that, I got quite quite friendly with Les Ellingham, the editor of Page 6 in the UK. I started writing a regular adventure column for Page 6 and won a prize for most popular article (for an arcade game, not anything adventure related). The prize was all the Brian Howarth adventures on cassette.

So, to answer your original question: anything from Scott Adams and Brian Howarth, type-ins from books (The Captain 80 Book of BASIC Adventures was one of my favourites), type-ins from computer magazines (SoftSide, Antic, A.N.A.L.O.G., Computer & Video Games, Page 6 et al), illustrated adventures from companies like Brøderbund, DataSoft, Sierra Online (the early ones up to ‘The Dark Crystal’, not the later ones) and so on.

My favourite was probably the SoftSide ‘Adventure of the Month’ series. This was a subscription service that sent you one adventure every month until it morphed into a bonus on the disk issue. There were 30 adventures in all for the Atari, Apple II and TRS-80. All top notch games. The most prolific of the authors was Peter Kirsch. His games got more and more sophisticated as time went on. They are still some of my most memorable games.

If you’re interested in my articles for Page 6, see https://www.page6.org/ and search for my name. I wrote about 20 adventure columns, mostly doing a major review of one or more commercial games, including playing strategy and coded hints. These will give you a flavour of what I was playing at the time. The major games I covered were (in alphabetical order) Blade of Blackpoole, Dragon Quest, Gruds in Space, Gunslinger, Lapis Philosophorum, Mask of the Sun, Mindshadow, Mission: Asteroid, Powerstar, Original Adventure, Rick Hanson, Sands of Egypt, Stonequest, Stranded, The Golden Baton, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Neverending Story, The Pawn, Transylvania, Wombats I, Zork I and a lot of smaller coverage, hints etc. for many other games.

Many happy memories and many great games amongst that list. I think all are available for emulators.

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Thank you, I’ll add this to my list of future games to try out. Very interesting backstory! I’m especially interested in trying out The Neverending Story.

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You should read my article on that one. It’s very comprehensive and covers the history behind the game, including the book, the movie and the game.

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My two cents:

EXAMINE vs SEARCH - Inform by default uses “search” as a synonym for looking inside something, like a drawer. I think for this reason most parser players don’t think of it as a separate action. Most games rely on EXAMINE solely. You can totally use SEARCH in this manner, but it’s good to make clear early (likely via tutorializing) that it’s a good idea to SEARCH THE JUNK COMPUTER to find a loose circuit board inside when EXAMINING THE JUNK COMPUTER only gives you a surface description.

Inventory limits - While many classic games base gameplay and puzzles on limiting the number of items that may be carried, most modern players find this more of an annoyance than a gameplay challenge. Recent games hand-wave carrying more items than would be logical with a backpack that serves as a holdall, or just ignore that the player is carrying 20 library books and enough random objects to restock a junk store.

I wrote a parser game that involved a major inventory limit to make some puzzles work and it was universally hated by everyone. I raised the limit, and changed it so small objects like notes and batteries didn’t count toward the limit.

If you need to write an encumbrance puzzle for narrative purposes or because you need the player to shed inventory for some reason, it’s best to make it a one-off - such as requiring the player drop everything else temporarily to carry a heavy air conditioner unit in both hands, or requiring them to drop all their bulky items and backpack to slip through a narrow crevice in a cave.

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…is a perfect strapline to make people want to play your game. What’s the title?

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I am probably one of the few people who managed to make ClubFloyd ragequit the game… Though I believe they played it before I made major updates. IFDB…

The location in Transparent recently became the basis for a minigame area in The Cursed Pickle of Shireton.

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Chris, did you ever get to play Lords of Midnight?

My early teen self didn’t have enough perserverance to complete it, but it has stuck in my mind as being a really innovative blend of narrative, rpg, and battle simulator.

I had a ZX Spectrum at the time.

It looks like this project still survives. Might be worth a look.

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I’ve played, loved and completed The Lords of Midnight - but it’s not really a text adventure or IF I’d say though - although Runestone, which used the same technique probably is…

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Runestone

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Runestone

I have won both types of victory on The Lords of Midnight, military and stealth victory. Sneaking Morkin up north is terrifying. It took me 25 years to complete the game, and I’ve probably put hundreds of hours into it. I know Doomdark’s Revenge is technically bigger and better, but The Lords of Midnight just has a better design in my opinion.

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Lords of Midnight

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Lords of Midnight

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Lords of Midnight

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Ren’Py doesn’t have any formal limits because as far as it’s concerned, an inventory item is simply a variable like any other (technically, the limit would be the number of lines of code that the computer could handle, but that would be a candidate for the most boring program of all time). Of course, keeping track of too many variables (inventory or otherwise) is tedious and unrewarding for the author, without necessarily helping the player or game enjoy the game any better. (Also, there’s as much a plausibility problem with suggesting your human protagonist can carry a tank and a spacecraft in their backpack with room for the Pacific Ocean, as there is with the single-item inventory limit the original Dizzy game had).

However, that’s soluable for the author… …by having items work in multiple contexts (preferably in different ways), grouping items in the program list to help keep track of them (which may or may not be made visible to the player in some form) or just keeping careful control of the item list in the first place. I think there are ways of conveying which (if any) of those solutions you’ve preferred for limiting item count, or if you’ve chosen to go with lots of items anyway, what solutions a player should consider for preventing the “go to one end of the map, pick up the key item and go to the other end of the map to use it” scenario.

Why would this be needed? Because early-1990s limited-inventory games overused that part of the trope to the point where it turned off large parts of the gaming population. The many different solutions different types of games created after that mean that unless a player is familiar with the type of game they’re playing (modern fashions for fusion gaming mean even using obvious audio-visual trappings of a long-established style aren’t a guarantee in themselves of conveying its type), or the game communicates what it wants in-game* they might try a mishmash of things from whatever gaming and media tropes are familiar to them. Sooner or later, that results in either success or boredom.

(Incidentally, this addresses why modern players don’t simply “drop the items you’ve finished with”. Enough games with inventories have been released where items must be re-used (sometimes in a follow-up title, thanks to the ability to transfer saves to expansion packs/sequels in some franchises!), or the game auto-removes unnecessary items, or using items later generates optional funny responses… …that a game that doesn’t communicate that dropping single-use items after that use is desirable in some way won’t result in gamers assuming that’s a good (or even feasible) way of finishing the game enjoyably. Inventory games of the type Garry Francis proposes are definitely possible and fun - provided the gamer understands that is the option out of all the possible ones that their game’s author has selected (and it makes some sort of sense in context - especially no “obligatory run across the entire map to carry one item the other way across the entire map” without sufficiently good reason for that player to lace up their digital trainers).

    • Documentation is a bonus, but authors must accept that most players don’t read it ever, and many who do only read it after beating the game and deciding they want to know more (or if there’s a technical problem). Even people who want to play a text-based game prefer reading game text to documentation text, in the main.
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One size does not fit all. I’m sure that a game could be designed around a one item inventory limit, where the inventory item choice itself is the puzzle. Outside of that, I still like having a limit, not out of any duty to reality, but to stave off the instincts of authors to lace their games with way too many objects in play at any one time.

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It could be… …but the plausibility issue would have to be solved before a player is likely to buy in. There was a point-and-click adventure back in the early 1990s for Commodore 64, whose name I forgot, that justified a 2-item limit by saying your character had been shrunk. That’s an attempt at resolving a plausibility issue (though I did not play the game to know if it made sense, only read a review). The original Dizzy, however, appeared to be a human-sized egg, so a one-item limit didn’t make sense there.

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I (personally) don’t care at all about plausibility. There can be good or bad designs around low or high inventory limits. If a game is designed around the 1 item limit then it’s better for having that limit, similarly, if a game is designed for no limits, then a low limit would destroy the playability of that game.

I love pretty much all the Dizzy games, except for Treasure Island Dizzy. The mechanics of a scrolling inventory system was awful. It wasn’t there for the player, it was to save the coders from building an in-game menu. Luckily they coded a good inventory system in Fantasy World Dizzy, albeit one that has a 3 item limit (that I found to be perfectly fine).

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Garry, I was looking back at this post and wanted to try some SoftSide games. I was going to start with Jack the Ripper, and I found a .atr file, but I’m having difficulty finding an Atari emulator to play them on. Do you have any recommendations for Windows?

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I think Altirra is probably the most popular. This is currently version 4.10.

I normally use Atari800Win PLus. The latest version is 4.1. You’ll note that the source code is now maintained on GitHub (there’s a link on the home page), but the executable is no longer stored on GitHub. In this case, you have four options:

  • Download the source from GitHub and build it yourself.
  • Do a Google search and you’ll find it on lots of emulator/ROM sites.
  • Click on the Downloads link on the home page and download the earlier version 4.0.
  • Send me a direct message and I’ll send you the zip file for version 4.1 that used to be on GitHub.

Whether you use Altirra or Atari800Win PLus, you’ll need to download the ROMs and copy these to the root folder (for Altirra) or the Rom folder (for Atari800Win PLus). To get the ROMs, you have a few options:

  • Use the link on the Atari800Win PLus home page.
  • Do a Google search for Atari 8-bit ROMs.
  • Send me a direct message and I’ll send you a complete set in a zip file.

If using Atari800Win PLus, this tutorial is very helpful for newbies.

The Peter Kirsch games are very good, but very old school. Expect a little bit of guess-the-verb, mazes (but not in Jack the Ripper) and getting killed a lot. His games do not have a save game feature, but I’ve added this feature to all my bug-fixed versions of the SoftSide Adventure of the Month series if anyone wants them. (They aren’t currently published anywhere.)

Jack the Ripper was one of his earlier games (#4 in the series). Some time later, he did two sequels (#28 and #30 in the series). Jack the Ripper Part II was planned for the Atari, but never published, as SoftSide went out of business shortly after. I was very familiar with Peter Kirsch’s coding style by this time, so I ported it to the Atari from the Apple II version. You can download this from Atarimania. It’s worth playing all three games in sequence, as they tell a very interesting story with some unexpected twists. The games can be quite hard, but I’ve done maps and solutions for CASA if you get into strife.

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Thank you, I look forward to trying them. I appreciate the detailed info!

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