I’m doing an inform7 game… I have included a few pictures for when people examine the scenery. Just curious… Are you a fan of pictures in Interactive Fiction? Not a fan? Don’t care? Everything in Moderation?
Any thoughts?
Greg
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It really depends. Games written in Adventuron typically have images, since Adventuron does a good job of supporting them. It’s (marginally) harder in other languages. Counterfeit Monkey is an example of an Inform 7 game with changing imagery.
I don’t really care whether there are images, as long as the text can stand on its own. When the images contribute something crucial to the game, then it stops being IF and becomes a variation of a point-and-click adventure game. Not necessarily bad, just not IF since the focus is no longer on the fiction part of interactive fiction.
Most interactive fiction don’t have images, though, and I think games that rely solely on prose tend to be better.
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It’s like most things: if well-made and at one with the text, I enjoy them. I avoid drawing bright lines around what does and does not belong in games. If the game is good, I want to play it.
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visual novels are interactive fiction. There are a lot of them.
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I think that if you hope to appeal to an audience outside of the “IF enthusiasts” niche then some sort of graphics is necessary. Not a full graphical representation of the story, just a minimum level of graphics such that when people look at the screenshots it triggers their “this looks like what a game looks like” sense.
An example of this is 80 Days. It’s (choice-based) interactive fiction at its core, focusing entirely on the text during the most engaging parts of its gameplay, but it has a graphical veneer (world map, visual inventory, occasional character art) that makes it “look like a game.” Reigns is another successful choice-based game that uses a thin “gamey” UI with simple graphics to look like a game. Sunless Sea arguably uses its pretty world map to obscure how heavily text-based the game is (although it also has combat, so hard to call it pure IF).
Visual novels are the extreme end of this: arguably very firmly inside the IF genre as far as their core gameplay is concerned, but because they have graphics (and specifically graphics that fit the particular visual language of game cutscenes) they have success in mainstream game marketplaces (Steam).
Conversely, I’m not sure that just inserting static images occasionally into a parser game really does much on this front; the screenshots for the steam release of Anchorhead, for example, do not look very “gamey.” But I’m curious how a parser game with a more Visual Novel-y presentation (i.e. always-present static background art, sprites occasionally overlaid on top, and text restricted to the bottom half of the screen) would do. I guess Adventuron games are kinda a step in that direction?
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I’m blind, so how a game looks is completely irrelevant to me.
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I’m not blind, and how a game looks is also completely irrelevant to me!
OK, that’s not entirely true, sometimes an especially cool cover image can help set a mood for a game, and a well-designed map or illustration of a puzzle can occasionally support the gameplay, but for the most part I tend to see bad/good art, think to myself “that piece of art was bad/good”, then continue playing the game without that judgment making much impact one way or the other.
That might not be an entirely typical reaction, of course, but I don’t think it’s entirely atypical either.
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I would be interested to see that too! This is basically what Japanese commercial parser games used to look like (or rather, VNs look like the Japanese parser games they evolved from), but a combination of the particular difficulties of Japanese-language parsing and the way console gaming basically obliterated PC gaming there meant that their reign was very short, and I don’t think there have been any commercial games that tried to do a throwback to the form—unless you count Square Enix’s terrible LLM-powered remake of The Portopia Serial Murder Case, which was poorly received for reasons unrelated to the graphics.
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I really enjoyed Legend Entertainment games, like Eric The Unready and Gateway 1 and 2. Later games became much more graphically oriented and I also liked them but I guess they can no longer be considered IF.
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The natural endpoint of including graphics in parser games is just regular videogames, which are of course a very popular genre.
So the question is, where do you stop on the evolution from:
plain parser game → parser game with location images → parser game with clickable images and hyperlink menu → myst-like games → regular video games
Most games in this community are in the first two areas; the middle of that region is the ‘point and click adventure game’ zone which still has strong active communities, and of course the right end is a multi-billion dollar industry.
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Is this your first game? I’m not sure I answered your question specifically, and want to be sure my reply is helpful.
Images are a built-in feature of Inform 7. It’s fine to use them, or not! If your vision for this game includes images, use them and show the game to some testers. Setting philosophical questions aside, quality matters.
A game doesn’t have to be 100% finished to be tested. It needs to be stable and playable.
Images are like any other feature of a parser game. Some people enjoy them and some people don’t, just like some people enjoy efficiency problems and some don’t. Some people like dialogue and some people dont. And so on. Images in Inform are not a special case.
The best answer is to cook up something playable and show it to people, IMO. You’ll be able to get a sense for how well images are working in your project.
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Natural endpoint? Regular games? There is as much variation between games that have graphics as between games with and without graphics. There were games with graphics just as early as there were text games. Creating a game that combines text and graphics is its own unique challenge, not just one point on a continuous spectrum towards Elder Scrolls or something.
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Well, I speak partially out of ignorance, as I’ve hyperfocused on only one or two areas of games.
So I could do better if I knew more. What are some cool games you’ve seen that take text and graphics in unusual directions?
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It’s understandable that text IF is one of the more accessible forms of gaming for the visually impaired, and it’s okay to make a small step toward images that don’t exclude people with accessibility text. This is provided for in Inform 7. When you declare your figures, you can enter alt-text with a description of the image or the sound:
§23.9. Providing accessibility text
It’s conventional for web pages to provide “alt-text” for significant images displayed, so that partially sighted or blind users can get an idea of what is being shown. Inform allows figures to be given these short descriptions like so:
Figure 2 is the file "butterfly.jpg" ("A red admiral butterfly.").As we’ll see, the same can be done for the cover image:
Release along with cover art ("A cathedral at sunset.").And also for sounds:
Fugue is the file "Bach.ogg" ("A church organ playing a Bach fugue.").
At some point in Brian’s progression from text IF to full-blown video games, it does become difficult to make them accessible. I made several games in AXMA that provide all sorts of interface tricks and popup menus that I was sad to learn does not work at all for accessibility.
Some games just won’t ever be accessible, so even as some people progress in creating media-rich games, we also should continue to make inclusive games and resist abandoning completely the text-focus of classic IF.
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Here’s what I ended up doing in my WIP/Semi-already-released game. Anytime I use a photo, it’s simply scenery. The textual description is the primary medium, examining the italicized scenery noted in the location description reveals a photo (when available) along with scenery description text. As in:
Continuing south gives the full description.
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That’s the other solution - include media such as pictures and sounds - basically as “feelies” that add to the presentation but don’t detract from the experience. IE: don’t include a safe-combination that is only spoken in an audio clip from a radio or visible in an image without describing it.
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I was never a big fan of images in text adventures back in the day… they always took up too much space on the screen… they were just as annoying as long descriptive passages of prose for me. There were some games that used small, subtle images for objects, though which I always thought were quite neat.
The 30th anniversary release of The Beast of Torrack Moor, is a great more modernised example of this. The Beast of Torrack Moor - 30th Anniversary Edition by Adventuron The pictures add a little something extra.
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Here’s an idea that I think would be interesting - use more decorative elements, borders, historiated initials, fonts, etc. The current IF comp entry The Bat uses 3 fonts in its cover art.
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I like the idea of images as decoration, and more decorative elements in general. I’m also in a few hobby bookbinding spaces and it’s always interesting to see the experiments in typesetting — elaborate art noveau esque frames for a fairytale feel, sections in blackletter fonts, faux blood splatters on the page, mimicking social media posts etc. The writing is still the focus, but there’s plenty of ways to add atmosphere via the design.
On images themselves, I don’t mind them, but something to keep in mind is how the player’s theme/typography settings may affect how they see the pictures. Do they look as intended on different coloured backgrounds or margin sizes? An issue I sometimes run into with ebooks is that I like reading in dark mode, but the embedded images have white backgrounds, which is really distracting. Or in online works, if I’ve set wide margins the embedded images can end up wider then the text, which also doesn’t look nice.
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Yes, this is my first inform7 game. I think this thread turned out many great answers, and I appreciate your views. I’ve decided to include a smattering of images as scenery in my game. The game is called “Quotient, the game” and is available here: http://simpsong00.github.io if you want to try it out! The published version only has 3 photos (but about 90 locations)… My next update will include about 7 photos… so they are few and far between.
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