Still Images in Text Adventures

I have one game with graphics, Attack of the Mutaydid Meat Monsters though it mostly uses them to illustrate text dumps. If you enjoyed Arthur, check out Eric the Unready (also has graphics, also by Bob Bates).

The Endling Archive by Kazumi Mishima/Dominic Delabruere uses photographs heavily (though it’s a very unconventional IF).

I’m trying to write a fantasy with 4bit images. You know, for the FEEL.

I have to say, if someone came up with a way to draw vector-ish graphics like the old Sierra games, I might give it the ol’ GUE Tech try.

Glimmr lets you do this, with built-in commands for drawing rectangles, boxes, filled boxes, points, and straight lines (at any angle), as well as sprites and type specified pixel-for-pixel. But I would probably recommend that you draw your vector images in an external editor and then include this in your game as simple PNG images. If you don’t allow the editor to alias them, and you don’t allow the game/interpreter to rescale them, they will look like the vector images of old.

Dang it, I was almost done with a post full of fancy links and stuff, but my laptop glitched and I lost everything. Anyhow, I second the recommendation for Infocom and Robb Sherwin’s games. Also, I’d recommend Kent Tessman’s Guilty Bastards and Future Boy! (although this one is hard to get a hold of these days; I hope it is re-released at some point).

Also, while I think they dropped the ball on some game design issues, Magnetic Scrolls games’ graphics went a long way towards their appeal. Wander around a bit in The Pawn or Guild of Thieves and you’ll see what I mean.

Some Level 9 games have interesting graphics, too, but I’m not too familiar with them.

Lastly, there was an Apple IIgs game called Dream Zone, written by two guys who would later go on to form Naughty Dog, the Uncharted series studio. It’s not a very good IF game, but it has some nice bits of humor in it. Anyhow, the main reason I mention is that it did this cute thing where the real world at the beginning of the game were digitized pictures (which seemed pretty new at the time), while the “dream zone” was wildly colorful. Anyhow, I thought the digitized-pictures section was cool.

Speaking of still images. does anyone know where to find someone who’d be interested in helping out with images? (for a reasonable amount, of course)

You could try the newgrounds.com “Art” forum section.

I’ll give it a go, thanks a million.

If you want more “retro”/low-res art, Pixelation has a commission request board.

Re: Joey’s original questions,

The first adventures I played - the early 80s Sierra Online games like Mystery House, Wizard and the Princess and Cranston Manor - had graphics permanently on display, with a few lines of text beneath for typing and feedback. To me, that was what an adventure game was. The graphics correlated with locations on a one to one basis (they changed each time you moved from one room to another) and most objects you could pick up or drop would be displayed on the screen if present, and removed when taken or destroyed.

Those graphics had the extra purpose of showing the features of the room. There wasn’t the need to say ‘you see a table’ – nor room for it in the 4 text lines beneath the display. You would just see a picture of a table and then try to interact with it by typing EXAMINE TABLE or something. Most prominent things you saw in the picture were there to be interacted with.

This worked in lots of ways - the graphics were elementary and relatively speaking, so were the games. You could try interacting with anything you saw in the drawings, quickly accepting that a feature was really just ‘painted on’ if the game returned ‘You don’t see that here.’ There wasn’t the graphical resolution yet to overstuff the image with non-functioning scenery/objects.

Outside of this style of game, other advancements were going on. Infocom with their dense text. And graphics got better. Then there came the querulous 16 bit era where some games still used graphics in every location, and a text parser beneath, and borrowed from both worlds. People can debate the success of these games (of which previously mentioned ‘Dream Zone’ is a good-looking example, and with cool music to boot) – but my experience was they emphasised the querulousness of BOTH text and graphics. The graphics were advanced enough that more features would appear in the graphics only, leading you to the kind of scanning you’d expect of a point and click adventure. At the same time, the text was a bit denser - but not that much. The feeling was you had to read between the lines of both. I find Level 9 adventures like ‘The Pawn’ fall painfully into this area, though the pics are really atmospheric. Also… the graphics would not necessarily change in every location, just sometimes. That was something that really disturbed me, but that’s because I came out of the Sierra school.

So today, given the detail you can put into graphics, and the amount of time we spend minimising distractions in the text descriptions that might cause players to try to play with things that aren’t there - I have a feeling graphics are perilously viewed (or they are by me :slight_smile:) because of what they can suggest which you then might have to implement. In a point and click game, we dispense with a zillion player actions in a contract knowing that wiggling cursors over hotspots will activate them. In text games, the hotspots are in the text, or can be read between the lines of the text. That’s what appeals to me in them vs point and click, that not everything is ‘there’ to be brute forced out. The illusion that I intuit the solutions and actions myself, from no list of options, is the magic part to me.

And then there’s the fact graphics are a ton more work. I’d like to see a Sierra styled one graphic = one room, plus you can see people and objects, and there’s a text parser on the side, game - done in modern style, but I’m never gonna do that and I’m not sure anyone else will.

  • Wade

After playing a few more games with an image-for-every-room. I can see one problem. When items are taken or scenery changed, in some games this isn’t reflected in an equal change in the graphic. This leads to a dissonance between the image and the text description of the room. Of course, adding extra images for each dynamic state of a room would be even more work.

Adding mini-images to the display for takeable items would help, though it introduces problems of its own.

Not necessarily that much more work. If you’re drawing using a computer, it is easy enough to place discrete items on their own layers, export layers as separate image files, and render the scene as a composite in-game. Glimmr (see my sig) makes this relatively easy, and includes extension that can help write much of the source code for you (Glimmr Canvas Editor).

–Erik

So that’s what Glimmr does. I’d seen its section in the extensions list but hadn’t investigated much further than that. Checking out your blog now, it looks really interesting. Are there any games released that use it?

I’m aware of two officially released games:

There are also a couple of unreleased games that I’ve seen that use it. The most ambitious use of Glimmr that I’ve seen is one of these, Prairie Fire. The project seems to be dead now, despite having been pretty far along last summer. (Sadly, requests for even low-level testing of the game seem to have been met with total indifference from the intfiction.org community.)

–Erik

I use a lot of Erik’s Glimmer stuff in my “Interactive Dreaming” game and in one case I already have an instance of an object disappearing from view when being taken. In that case all I do is loop between one version of the image with the item and one without (no layering used). The game is still in early stages though due to working on another project and also needing to get out and take still pictures of locations I envisioned for the game.

The problem with using multimedia in your game is you need to consider how effectively your game is handled in alternate environments. Take ADRIFT, for example. It has a limited ability to display images and play sounds. However, what if someone tries to run a game in one of the unofficial web runners for ADRIFT? Will the images display? Will your sounds play?

Quest has possibilities on this line because it’s designed to do these very things.

I’ve also seen Inform games with embedded html links so you can click a link in a game running in Parchment and it pops up an image from a web resource.

These sorts of things are improving. But it’s definitely something to consider if you want your game available to the widest possible audience.

I might be able to help out. Shoot me a PM with details about what you’re looking for and we’ll discuss. :slight_smile:

Which version of Runner are you using?