Our community is very niche. I am the only one in my irl social group that knows-of and/or plays/builds them. I think that part of the reason this is the case is because there are not many resources to learning how they work short of spending time on a video or reading about them in a generic set of instructions. I built ifspace as a fun project, and then was excited to share the news with my two brothers, but they had no idea where to start or what to do, and they definitely didn’t know how to build them using the software… so anyway, I decided to make a very short text adventure that “teaches” how text adventures work in a pretty general way. I’m sure this isn’t the first one of these, but I definitely couldn’t easily find another example. This particular one is geared towards ifspace specifically since it is what I work with the most. If any of you have a recommendation to generalize the instructions even more so that they fit any (or most) modern authoring systems, I’m all ears and I can make changes easily. But let me know what you think! I’ll also send the link to my siblings and see if it helps.
I think you might be interested in Adventuron, who’s aim is to teach Text Adventures in Classrooms. They have a Text Adventure Jam every year on itch: 2021 - Text Adventure Literacy Jam 2023
There is also Moiki that lets you build IF games with little to no coding. Inklewriter is also on a similar path. Even Twine has some pretty easy cookbook to start out. Though both of these are less Text Adventure focused, and more general IF/Choice-based.
It’s true that some Authoring Systems need quite a bit of knowledge, but there are still quite a few out there geared towards users with little to no coding language.
Yes, Chris Ainsley’s Text Adventure Literacy Project is literally about encouraging people to create games that include (or serve) as tutorials as to how to play text adventures. There have been several TALP jams. Some games include :: CASA :: Games - TALP (19 results) (but most haven’t yet been tagged appropriately in the CASA database).
Edit: To grab Manon’s useful link from another thread, for those games that are hosted on itch Search results for 'TALP' - itch.io (I must admit I deleted mine own off there while I still try and process my thoughts about the .io domain nonsense)
