If you’re curious, this is how my concept ended up turning out. Like I mentioned, actions to be performed are listed as links at the bottom and the links in the prose are only for examining (which can lead to an action to perform on the object upon examination).
This is taken from my phone. The font sizes and such are slightly different on PC.
Edit: @fos1, I’m curious what you think of the link colors now. I changed them based on your comments. Are they easier to see?
Looks nice, and very similar to what AXMA does. I could see holding to a convention that in-line links are “examine only” with pop up windows and the bottom links are for more decisive actions, but I break that all the time.
Hey! Dark mode! 
A serif font, huh? Am I the only person who dislikes why so much I-F seems to love serif fonts? They look busy to me. This forum uses sans serif for body text, and it seems normal.
I still get the scansion issue. But the text is still prettier using understated sepia rather than BIG BOLD BLUE.
(Also why spend so much text describing room exits when they’re already listed in the choices?? I hate reading a paragraph of room exit descriptions. Which you’re not doing here, but a comp entry had a room with like seven exits, and my eyeballs just melted.)
Do you have a link to the game? I’ll give it a whirl. Seems like the lines will be too close together for fat fingers on mobile.
I do like the horizonal line, and the bullet points. The bullet points ensure I won’t mistake two options for one. I had that issue with another comp entry. Clicked the only link offered, but only half of it blinked color on click. I don’t even know what the other option was. (When there’s one long option, why read the whole thing? There’s no choice…)
This is a slightly older version so the link color is still gray, but otherwise it’s almost the same as that image.
https://tayruh.github.io/monster/
As for the font, once you play the game maybe you’ll see why I chose it. I associate sans-serif with being modern and that didn’t fit the theme for me.
Your interface is slick! But the refresh button needs an are-you-sure popup on it. I pressed it not knowing what it was and nuked my progress.
Unsure if the u-turn button is go back or undo or whatever.
What did you make this with?
I made it from scratch using an engine I wrote.
The github is here: https://github.com/Tayruh/sadako
This is my dedicated thread for it on here: Sadako: a new hypertext adventure engine
Good call on the restart button. I’ll definitely add a confirm prompt. The u-turn button is an undo button.
It would be a hard sell for sure. They exist but generally original English VN while they exist and a small section has seen commercial sucess, and even less so if they are not at least tangentially of a romantic nature.
Button size issue is a factor in at least some visual novels; they were traditionally played on computers at the low end of resolution for their age. Buttons have to be a certain size to be easily readable, especially if the choice text is long (particularly likely in visual novels where the “prompt” text doesn’t remain on screen when the choice menu appears). The increasing number of visual novels that get adapted to mobile phones feel this need even more keenly, for a button that is too small simply cannot be clicked upon.
Also, design choices about how those buttons appear dont help. Visual novels traditionally don’t use scroll bars to extend the space in which buttons can appear (though some do). Choices are also expected to appear in a single column, with at least some space between each button to avoid mis-clicks.
The result is that visual novels typically have no more choices than screen space for their intended primary platform. If it’s a relatively modern one for the PC, that restriction wouldn’t be so restricting. If it’s a multi-platform effort, or designed in the 1990s, don’t expect more than 4, and verbose descriptions may not even allow as many as 3 choices in the more extreme examples.
There’s another factor, and that is choice paralysis. Since every option is right there in front of the player’s face, the player will inevitably consider them all. Give a player too many and you risk them freezing (I’ve faced this in playtesting with as few as 4 choices, though there’s no hard-and-fast answer for this).
Parser-based games don’t have this problem because only part of the range of options is ever visible, and then some/all of them are likely to be dressed up as something else (nouns are often all in the room description, which is likely to be a complete sentence). Even if all possible verbs are shown on a list (which I’ve seen done), the list doesn’t change and eventually becomes part of the furniture. All this to say: parsers solve the choice paralysis issue by encouraging the player to consider one option at a time, accept or reject that idea in their own head and perhaps typing it into the game before picking up the next idea for what to do next.
Twine games (and most likely any other authoring system that produces links in a browser) already does this by the player pressing TAB (which skips between links).
These days most VNs get around the cramped choices by having them appear above the text box (generally vertically centered) so they can have a lot more choices and space between them for clarity.
I don’t think button size is the main reason choices are limited in VNs though. Most only have three choices because that’s the optimal amount of choices. Two choices is usually a right or wrong choice (they’re rarely equally positive or negative). If there are four or more choices, then most likely it’s a fake choice that doesn’t affect the story and only has a text box or two of differing content. You have to write what’s behind those choices, after all, and you can’t branch the story eight different ways at every choice box since it increases the workload exponentially.
I’ve literally never been able to get my friends to play a parser game beyond a couple moves. The amount of choice or illusion of choice that parser games offer is so paralyzing that they don’t even try and give up immediately. I’ve never had that problem with choice based games because most of them aren’t invested in the beginning and will just click a random choice to continue the game.
Choice paralysis in choice games comes when the player is invested in their character to the point that they care what happens when they select a choice. Choice paralysis in parser games happens as soon as the prompt appears.
Interesting. I had the exact opposite problem: the parser, by itself, doesn’t make it apparent that any options work, so they assumed they had none.
Yeah, I could see that.
I was actually just discussing this with my girlfriend to see what her thoughts were on it, and we came to the conclusion that even someone that had never played D&D can immediately grasp the concept of controlling their character because you just relay your intent in conversational English. With parser games, it’d be like saying “I want to peek outside the door.” and the DM is like “I don’t understand the word ‘peek’. You lose your turn.”
It’s overwhelming for new players to be given the impression that they can do whatever they want, but actually they can only do a few things and have to say it in a specific way. It’s not difficult to learn and the same commands apply to nearly all parser games, but getting them to stick with it is difficult. I’m asking them to learn a whole input framework before they even know if this is something they might enjoy.
Choice games (including VNs) are a lot more accessible because of their visible choices, but then you run into the issue of breadth versus depth. If you have many choices, you can pretty much guarantee that those choices have little impact on the story and are in bite sized chunks of text. Which is not unlike a parser game, I suppose. I don’t think that highlights the strength of choice based games though.
I think adults tend to overthink it. When I was a child, I learned to play text adventures very quickly. The expected verb-noun syntax is not difficult to grasp. I introduced my nephew to IF last year during lockdown and we played them together over Zoom. He was eight at the time and also had no difficulty understanding the expectations of the parser. At one point he actually asked me “can I type ‘TAKE ALL’?” When we tried playing a choice-based game he quickly grew bored, telling me “I like thinking of what to do next” and we quickly went back to parser. Some of my adult friends on the other hand had difficulties similar to what you’re describing.
That’s very much my own experience of kids playing parser games, immortalised in such responses from my own 7 year old offspring as: “yes, yes you don’t have to tell me what to do”, “how do I turn off tutorial mode? It’s really annoying!” and “you know Daddy, you can just leave me to play this on my own if you want to.”
Children are generally cleverer than adults.
This is actually a great observation. I think I’m roughly of the same generation as you, and the first adventure game I tried was Colossal Cave with a two-word parser which cemented the idea “I need to tell it VERB NOUN - the game just wants to know do something to a thing.”
Then along came Infocom with its more flexible parser, and the ad-copy is “talk to it in normal sentences.” …But… the only major difference is players have a potential second noun to play with; you can VERB NOUN WITH NOUN “do something to a thing with another thing”.
So new players who are told “You can just type anything!” are being inadvertently misled and come up with commands that make sense in English but the parser won’t ever understand like:
>DOES THE MAILBOX CONTAIN ANY MAIL?
>INVESTIGATE WHO OWNS THAT WHITE HOUSE TO THE WEST
>SEE IF ANYONE IS HOME
>I WOULD LIKE TO CLEAR RUBBLE FROM THIS GARDEN
Someone familiar with Colossal Cave or any two-word parser game will already grok that most every command boils down to two words and writing it a business letter like
>PICK UP THE BLOODSTAINED KEY AND USE IT TO UNLOCK THE FABULOUS DOOR TO THE WEST AND THEN OPEN IT AND GO THROUGH THE DOOR
might work in some of the fancier Infocom titles, but really what you want to do is
>TAKE KEY. UNLOCK DOOR WITH KEY. OPEN DOOR. W
I believe children go through a wet-clay/sponge mode with regard to conceptual learning. That’s why it’s easier for young people to learn a foreign language than it is for adult. It’s like at some point many grownups unwittingly break off the tab that allows large concepts like “how a language works” to be written to the hard drive in their brain.
I think it is wrong to assume that there is something special about parser games that make them hard for adults to pick up. My hunch is that if you weren’t exposed to platform games or 3D shooters at an early age, you will have just as much trouble with them.
That’s definitely true. Thanks to my parents, I’ve bared witness to that tragedy. My mom trying to play Mario 64 was quite the sight to behold.
The obvious advantage that choice games have over parser games is that if someone can work a web browser, they can play a choice game. Meanwhile my dad still hunt-and-pecks the keyboard with one finger, so I don’t think he’s up to the challenge of playing a parser game.
Hey! I still hunt-and-peck the keyboard (with two fingers).
IF is great in that I can take as much time hunting and pecking at my commands as I want. Bowser’s not going to squash me before I hit ENTER.
I concur! Having never owned a console of any kind, I struggle with most of my nephew’s PlayStation games. One first person shooter I tried required one controller for moving around and another for looking around, something that felt completely alien to my experience. I spent most of the game running into walls. The Lego games were much more on my level.
Writing IF has turned me into a touch typist. I use more than two fingers, though I’m sure I don’t type the way a properly trained typist would.