Better UI doesn’t hurt, but can only go so far when the primary medium is still text. After all, these things aren’t new: Beyond Zork had a clickable map for navigation, while Zork Zero had a clickable compass rose. The end user effort required will always be higher for text.
As an analogy, consider Marvel: No matter what niceties you might theoretically add to their comic books, Marvel movies (even the bad ones) will still pull in orders of magnitude more people.
It doesn’t mean that text can’t be better than video, or provide unique experiences video can’t, but it does pretty much always mean fewer people will be willing to experience it.
There’s a lot of clout behind it. The lead designers later would create Bard’s Tale, and one of the programmers was “Burger” Becky Heineman. The wikipedia page on Borrowed Time has undersourced flags, but in this context, I expect the info’s pretty solid.
@moderators, would it be a good idea to split the topic? It seems that this conversation has gone from commercial viability of parsers to parser games with buttons/graphical interfaces. I think it mostly branched off here.
I made this graphic that’s a really crap representation of my idea, but it would not leave the player in doubt where they are. Missing are u/d and ordinals, because not sure how to do those. Also, I think clicking is a better idea than typing, but I have this set up for typing:
Automapping is not a bad idea. I’d hate it, but this isn’t about what I like. Although there are some games, like diBianca’s recent ones, where the automapping is well done.
That was great! Notice that the text is no longer limited to 4 lines on the bottom of the screen. I didn’t mind the lack of on screen keyboard because it wasn’t on the phone!
I think that Tass Times in ToneTown actually improved it by limiting the verbs, and to show them as icons. Between verb and item icons, it makes usability real sweet! Lack of keyboard isn’t a big deal here.
For general audiences, sure, but if reading is what bounces someone off a game, then IF doesn’t have a hope of pulling them in, and I don’t think our energy should be spent transitioning to visual games.
That’s why we’re here, yeah? At least that’s why I’m here. I’ve already spent many years working on visual games, and realized I hated the visual part of the process.
I really do feel like the focus should be how to make parsers more accessible to people who don’t bounce off of reading text. I know quite a few avid readers who find parsers too intimidating/overwhelming/confusing to continue playing, and I’m certain that some minor, straightforward UI/UX tweaks can really help with the on-ramp here.
To clarify, GrueScript is made by Robin Johnson, directly based on his award-winning game. My early experiment was called Adventure Prompt, and looked rather better out of the box. In fact it inspired the default stylesheet of my newer engine, and that of some Twine games, all of which were more successful.
Speaking of Twine, the default stylesheet of Harlowe or SugarCube is nothing to write home about either. It wasn’t until Chapbook that good typography became priority #1. But Twine invites you to change the styles, maybe that’s why it works.
Ordinals are essential to the player’s (my) feel of the geography. The starting forest in Once and Future (which I’m playing now) has only cardinal directions. My mental image of a fantasy-forest clashes hard with the immediate experience of tracing parallel lines on a grid.
I merely meant that your analogy was itself analogous to the old argument about books and movies. Films were originally silent because the technology did not yet exist to add synchronised sound. When that technology became available silent films disappeared. Your analogy was that a similar thing happened to text-based games when more powerful computers, capable of detailed graphics appeared in the 1980s. Whilst I think the comparison is valid, I object to the inference that text games are somehow deficient because of their lack of graphics and sound, in the way that silent movies are deficient when compared with “talkies”, and that the way to “fix” them is to add those things. To my mind a parser game (and indeed any text-based IF) is a complete and valid artform in its own right - in much the same way that books are. Many attempts have been made in the past to add “ease of consumption” and these have generally taken the same forms, compass roses, on screen inventories, buttons for verbs etc, but like 3D movies these innovations never stay the course, and I don’t believe they bring in many new players either. Strand games are already doing most of these things with their Magnetic Scrolls remakes; those interested in developing a new Inform interface should buy one and take a look.
I have to admit that, after twenty-odd years of writing parser games I’m completely burned out on them. The audience for them is very small and there are so many other games out there competing for attention that the time investment just doesn’t seem worth it any more. I’ve published six and my seventh is likely to be my last. A polished parser game can take me, at a bare minimum, three years to make. Alias ‘The Magpie’ took twelve. To Sea in a Sieve, to my regret, was not polished enough because I gave myself a false deadline rather than releasing it when I was completely happy with it. I’ll be 54 this year, and I’m starting to think about how effectively to spend the time I’ve got left. I have lots of stories to tell, and a good choice-based game can be made in a few months. Plus I’ve a lot to learn about choice-based IF and it’s got me excited about writing again. It’s an odd feeling, to leave the parser medium behind after so long, but it feels right.
You’re one of those people who know where they are in time and space, aren’t you? Like, you can probably look at the sun and say “I’m facing northeast and it’s probably about noon.”
And I’m sorry if I came across like a pompous ass. I do sometimes post things and afterwards think, well, I could have put that a little more politely. I can get carried away with my opinions sometimes, and they are just opinions, after all.
No. School had nothing like this and anyone who ever met my parents would laugh at the idea of them being organized enough to get a kid to a scouts program.
I am very envious of people with these abilities. I am severely challenged by time and space. Even left and right are things I have to think about. I’m that person to whom people are always saying, “No, your OTHER right.”
In another words, the interface and mechanism of early 8/16 bit “3D” RPG (bard’s tale and SSI ADD “gold box” series) mated to an IF engine. I can’t deny that IS a good idea.
I should have around no less than the physical manual of Bard’s tale construction kit and Forgotten realms unlimited adventures, both having an ADRIFT-style “fill the blanks” coding/building system, but definitively tailored to RPG… after the Spring thing I’ll install the binaries on dosbox (legally, because I have still around also the physical original disk, on top of the manuals…) and I’ll fool around, perhaps i can concoct something rensembling an IF…
Thanks, Amanda, for giving a renewed usefulness to this old closed-source software I still have around !
I really would love to make a working extension of the subroom effect Zarf built into Shade. Interacting with an object in one part of the room different from the player’s location caused the player to automatically walk to that part of the room. It was unobtrusive but really made the apartment space in the game feel more dynamic.
This was the inspiration for the 3D DoomParser project. I know that graphical parser games like Hugo’s House of Horrors or King’s Quest still maintained all the pros and cons of a parser while removing navigation from the parser altogether. I feel like the same thing could be accomplished with a First and/or Third Person 3D environment. The familiarity of navigation and being able to look around and grasp environmental storytelling might ease people into trying the parser functionality. The trade off being the loss of accessibility.
Deeply agree with this. I feel like anyone who hates reading (or listening for audio IF) isn’t really who we’re trying to reach anyway. (Sorry for the multi-reply. Still backreading.)
