I am developing something that I call text cRPG game. And I am trying to figure out what genre it is mostly adjacent to. Somebody on reddit said it is a parser game and point me to this forum.
In the beginning, several years ago I thought about it as a MUD for single user (SUD). But not the offline version of MUD. It was suppose to be designed for single user experience. Therefore it is also not an interactive fiction, nor text adventure.
The visuals are similar to MUD. Locations (there is alot of them) are mostly background for exploration and lore building. There are some that player can interact with - like in TA.
Syntax/commands - I kept it simple (simpler than in IF/TA), the commands are like “kill guard”, “take key”, “talk inkeeper”. Can be shortened: “k gu”. No highly specific one-time commands (like “enroll”).
TL:dr; Imagine Baldur’s Gate 1 but in text.
Did anybody seen game like that? Is it still parser game?
Yes. still a parser game, even with the shorthands (which are today standardised in a specific set of one-letter commands, and player expect these one-letter verbs in IFs)
I don’t hide that mid-90s I fooled around a bit with the same concept, up to actually experimenting around some MUD source (circleMUD and, IIRC, pennMUD), but in the end I dropped the experimentation.
I think the “one-time commands” (situation-specific commands, really) are a significant part of the parser IF concept. If you have a fixed list of commands which can always be abbreviated, that is more in the roguelike direction. The fact that you hit Enter after commands rather than reading them key-at-a-time doesn’t feel like a deep difference.
Doesn’t mean we can’t talk about it here, of course.
Yes, someone else on the Discord said that with simplifed syntactical approach it’s not much of a parser. I can probably agree with that, sure.
What always bums me out is mixing differentiation by interface with differentiation by genre. Because parser game can be text adventure, IF, strategy, sim etc, right? And on the other hand FTL is roguelike (no text commands there).
My tactic here is, that first of all - I want to make gameplay smoother. And second - in context of “contract with player” I don’t want to discourage player with commands that works like in 5 of 2000 locations and leave player with guessing or tedious tryouts.
When there are puzzles they can be verbal (within npc dialogues), environmetal (levers, items, traps). But the main focus here is multibranched quests moved by decison within dialogues, and exping/grinding.
There were some people in the roguelike community very earnestly declaring that my Kerkerkruip was not a roguelike because it had an interactive fiction interface, which… well, it bummed me out!
My biggest issue with Eamon over the years is that there has never been one standard Eamon engine that could run on anything, let alone with a standard (screen reader accessible) text interface. Eamon Deluxe was the closest we ever got, but after a while, because Microsoft removed the ability to run DOS programs in 64-bit Windows, it was no longer usable. Eamon Remastered is accessible to screen readers, but it requires an internet connection to play, which isn’t usually a deal breaker, except for the fact that unless I’m playing a MUD, I personally like to play IF and other accessible RPGs in a command line window when possible. Not to mention the fact that it’s impossible to write new eamon adventures unless I set up a self-hosted eamon remastered server, and am willing to learn Ruby, to do so.
The very idea of a text-based modular role-playing game is remarkable. It’s surprising that it hasn’t received further development, aside from online games. As for Eamon, I think it should be completely rewritten, possibly using existing IF tools.
(no text commands there).