Rewriter - combined walking simulator and text adventure

Technical Development Development Systems
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(Apols if there is a better place to put this - I couldn’t find one)

While posting, I was recommended to see this thread/game from 12 years ago, which is fascinating as something that approaches a similar idea but in a very different way: DEMO: Combining text adventure and 3D graphics - Playing / Game Hints - The Interactive Fiction Community Forum

I’ve posted a little about my custom parser in the last year, but in the meantime I’ve fleshed out a lot more of the 3D side of my game, which (elevator pitch) embeds text adventure ‘vignettes’ within a 3D world. In the text adventure segments, you control ‘AI agents’ in the past, and what you do there changes the future (which is uhh the present, but also the future. Yeah I need to work on this bit).

I thought you might be interested to see a bit of the 3D world. I made a couple of videos showing different stages of the game (so far), with lots of placeholder stuff around. But hopefully you get the gist. The actual interactive fiction elements (arguably the most important part) are now lagging behind the 3D side, but I’ll switch back to them shortly.

Chapter 1 intro: “Rewriter” start of Chapter 1 (demo version 26 Apr 2026) - WORK IN PROGRESS

Chapter 3 intro: “Rewriter” start of Chapter 3 (demo version 26 Apr 2026) - WORK IN PROGRESS

(Apologies for terrible video compression, which is Youtube’s doing, not mine.)

What is not very evident from the videos is how the 3D world and the text adventure worlds are linked up. Items and locations you see in the text adventures are embedded in the 3D world as (mostly) actual physical items, some of which can be interacted with in either world. It’s all custom, which means that there are probably a lot of dumb ideas floating around. My priority is to get the game finished, but it is possible that I may decide to put time into making some tools to make this system (based in Unreal Engine 5) more of a general-purpose development system. I will probably see how things pan out with the game itself and whether I am motivated to make any kind of sequel or to make something else similar.

I’ll be happy to chat about any aspect of the adventure system (3D or text), though the very custom nature means that there are probably few useful lessons to be learned from it (yet).

But hopefully this is of interest to some. And still the big questions remain: does combining the 3D side and the text side actually make any sense? Is it actually enjoyable gameplay? I’m still not sure… hey ho.

Edit: just a word about the general approach perhaps - my aim is to make the text adventure segments as accessible as possible and to avoid (where possible) people getting stuck on solutions. There will be a very comprehensive hint system (called research) which aims to be at least partly proactive. I am also trying to provide lots of different UI elements to assist the more casual player. For example, there is an automatic generation of problems and solutions (bottom right window) as you progress through the adventure, to help people keep track of what they need to be solving, and to make it feel less open-ended. It would be stupid for me to say I think this is a new idea, because I’m sure it’s been done about 20 times before.

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The 3D / text integration reminds me a little bit of the original Marathon, where you’d fight through a level to reach a terminal to connect to Durandal, who would give you a big dump of story exposition.

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Will the game use LLMs, like ChatGPT, for these agents?

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Perhaps counterintuitively, no. No AI used at all, though the game as a whole is something of a meditation on the impact of AI on our world.

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Interesting. I hope to have my exposition relatively more digestible, but one element I have is unplayable transcripts that can be unlocked, essentially as exposition dumps.

Dialogue with the NPC and examinable objects in the 3D world are other sources of exposition, but I’m trying to keep them as ‘undumpy’ as possible.

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A little dev update here, showing the interaction with objects across both the 3D world and adventure world. I am beginning to feel that it is going to be weird not to have a camera feed for each location you’re in, though that is something I had hoped would not be the case. But what plays best is what plays best, I guess.

Rewriter game progress update 3 May 2026

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Another little update on the text adventure / 3D world integration. Now the AI agent that you may see pictured in camera feeds will have an inventory in the 3D world that is synchronised to the inventory in the adventure world (with a lot of guard rails and shortcuts, of course).

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For the sake of my sanity (it would be an animation nightmare), the feed skips the actual execution of whatever command is typed, and just shows you the aftermath

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I recall seeing a few discussions about UI recently. In case of interest, I decided that I needed to add another layer of help, specifically to help people unfamiliar with text adventures with the UI of my text adventure sections. This is still WIP, but I decided on a system like this:

It’s fairly easily extendible and uses a custom line drawing widget. The help interface auto-launches by default once the initial text dump / dialogue has finished.

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I like how, in the first video, the injured woman remembered to bring a crutch to work in case she got blown up that day :smiley:

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My ‘well akshually’ answer is that she normally uses crutches, and you’ll find one left behind inside the bunker later on. My ‘it’s a fair cop’ answer is that ok, it’s a fair cop… there are probably bigger holes to be found in my storytelling :slight_smile:

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I did actually wonder if she was already using the crutches!

The only actually useful feedback I had on what was a very interesting looking demo video, is that it seemed odd that the AI said there was no time to talk, and then proceeded to produce walls of text you’d have to read. I’d have expected it to be terser?

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Yeah, that’s fair. Useful feedback. I might trim it down on a later pass. It’s a contrived situation, of course, though there are also reasons for that which become clearer later.

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Also in case of interest, the research (hint) system I mentioned above is fairly central to my game. I have deliberately game-ified it so that people will be more amenable to use it when they get stuck (as opposed to a more transparent hint system that people avoid because ‘it’s cheating’). I am also pushing it to the player from the start:

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That was just the tutorial. The uncovered research is trite (the suggestion to use the Help command). But it’s also tied into world objects (items and rooms) so you can RESEARCH {item} to see if there is ‘research’ on it. This is usually a sentence or two of text, but I’ve also got a research item that shows you a safety card for a deep fat fryer (I’m hoping to do a few more leftfield ones like that). There can be multiple research items that are unlocked on successive turns.

My aim, as noted elsewhere, is to guide players through the sections in the service of a larger narrative. I don’t want people to get hopelessly stuck. It is certainly a convention of the genre, but I don’t actually derive much pleasure from being stuck as such, and never did.

I also have these objectives to help focus players on what they need to be solving, to keep things more bounded:

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As you progress through each text adventure section, the solutions get filled in and more problems often arise.

The twist is that I aim to provide enough hints (research) to get more or less any standard of player through each section, eventually (the hints, at the furthest point, are sometimes literally the commands to type to solve the puzzle), but there are alternative solutions which are not hinted at. If you want to drive yourself mad, try finding all of those … some of those extra solutions were just reasonable tries from playtesters that I thought would be unfair to deny. Strangely, I have found many parallels between working with playtesters on my game, and helping to set and mark patent amendment papers for patent attorney qualifying exams (you think you’ve telegraphed a particular solution, but some people go off on a very different, but reasonable, tangent).

There is a chapter selection menu in the main menu where you can see all possible solutions, and how many of them that you have found:

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These will probably translate into Steam achievements and suchlike. But hopefully there is enough to retain the interest of hardcore IF players such as most people reading this post…

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I think this is going to cause physical pain to some people

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