What techniques or approaches can be used? Say, for example, someone was making a Call of Duty text adventure. How does one incorporate that into a text adventure? Can it even be done?
And I am not talking about reducing it to Splinter Cell style of gameplay, where there is more stealth and evasion, than actual gunplay. Although “lightening” the gunplay is acceptable.
A lot of RNG? Which direction a person or enemy is facing? How many enemies are in the vicinity?
Equipment stats? On screen or sound prompts? I do not mind borrowing techniques from MUDs. And I would love hearing from the visually impaired community, as I want everyone to be able to play the game and hopefully enjoy it.
I will take all the advice you can give. And if it makes a difference, I am currently using Adrift 5 and Quest as my main game making engines. Thank you.
mah, aside Peter Turrican’s wargames (the lonely parser-based wargames) there was a 1980s commercial IF (don’t remember its name, sorry) in which the player leads a squad thru a battle, giving orders &c; perhaps you can try to procure and play it, perhaps this can give some answer to your questions ?
Well, what purpose do you want the gunplay to serve?
Do you want the main focus of the gameplay to be how well you can shoot and take cover, with your ability to survive coming down to tactical positioning and movement?
Do you want gunfire to be a constant threat that the player needs to avoid, with getting into a firefight being a fail state? (Sounds like you’ve specifically ruled this one out.)
Do you want combat to come down to dice rolls and random chance, so the main locus of player skill is ensuring you end up in fights you’re likely to win, and stacking the deck in your favor?
There are various ways you can incorporate gunplay into a text-based game, but focusing on reflexes and quick aiming (like in first-person shooters) generally won’t work, because the conventions of IF are built around giving you unlimited time to think about your actions, and describing the environment in broad strokes rather than exact positions. (You can break these conventions, of course, but the farther you get from them, the less the existing IF canon and tools will be able to help you.)
So imo, the key will be deciding what exactly the player will be doing as they play the game—what the core of the gameplay will be. Tactical positioning? Resource management? Stealth and evasion? Preparing for fights? Using the right response to your enemy’s actions? That will inform all the rest. Off the top of my head, some examples you might want to look at are Forsaken Denizen, Kerkerkruip, and I Am Prey; none of them have gunplay at their core, but they all have a core gameplay loop that I think could be adapted well to a focus on guns. Tolti-Aph might finish out the group by having randomized D&D-style combat, but the combat in that game is not very well-regarded, so it’s not a great example; does anyone have better examples of this style on hand?
Gun Mute is definitely the canonical shooting-based IF for me, but for a different take, you might also want to check out Centipede from the IF Arcade: Centipede - Details
Right, I think the entire IF Arcade series is worth considering for ideas about translating game mechanics to IF. I was thinking about Space Invaders as another example from there.
It could give you some ideas about how different things can be implemented — and more importantly, where you’d encounter problems.
Possibly a little bit of everything, as different situations, may call for different approaches to game play. I just do not know how to incorporate or what would work best, until actual testing is done. But before testing, it needs to be implemented.
It seems like you’re asking the right questions. Let me get this straight, you want to make a text-adventure game with shooting in it? If so that would be a challenge indeed!
I was absolutely blown away by Fallout 3’s ability to turn gun fighting into turn-based tactical shooting. The V.A.T.S system was absolutely brilliant with the way it allowed you to target areas of the body and affect the way the fights played out.
Perhaps you can merge that kind of targeting system into a text adventure. If you’re not dogmatic about pure text, you might present a silhouette of the target and allow the player to choose areas to exploit.
Not IF, but guns are a weapon type in the grid-based, turned based tactical/strategy RPG series Disgaea, and the way that genre handles projectile weapons might be useful in how to handle them in IF since the genres share the notion of action being devided into discrete turns and the player thinking through their actions instead of the action being continuous and real-time… Can’t think of any grid-based SRPGs other than Disgaea(There is Valkyria Chronicles, but that dispenses with the grid and makes shooting more like a third person shooter than a turn-based RPG battle) with guns, though bows are a genre staple(In disgaea, the two weapon types are distinguished by bows being able to hit any target in a centered square arrangement within range of the user and are powered by the average of the users ATK and HIT stats while Guns shoot in straight lines along grid rows and columns and are powered only by the HIT stat… and of course, completely different sets of weapon-specific special attacks).
Of course, over laying a battle grid on a IF map might be tricky with standard IF systems.
This is a great thread. I am currently working on an IF western and there needs to be gunfights! - I mean you just can’t have a western without it.
Anyway, my current plan is to incorporate some kind of “skill chance” which wouldn’t be a shooter type thing but instead some kind of real-time interaction nevertheless.
I have a number of working hypotheses, but i need to build this to see how it shakes out in practice.
But the more i think about it, there is no real reason why real-time skill elements couldn’t be accommodated in an IF production.
So people have already named Gun Mute. Gun Mute has suspense and pacing and boss fight type strategies. It’s a well-designed version of fun gunfighting.
Dead Man’s Hill (2017) by Arno Von Borries is a WWI trench warfare simulator.
It has lots of weapons. You can give soldiers orders. While it’s gamey in how it’s played and what you can try to do in it, and with a lot more tech detail than a Gun Mute, it’s not gamey in that its brand of realism is chaotic death. This game teaches that you will rarely get far. Most often you’ll be blown up by a stray grenade. I don’t know if there is any other IF like it, so I would definitely play this one.
