Text adventures with graphics had their commercial heyday between 1980 (Mystery House) and ca. 1993 (Gateway II). I suppose you do not mean point’n’click adventures.
“Interactive fiction” is not defined by the absence of graphics. The homebrew scene has abstained from graphics for a long time because it meant to have skills authors didn’t have, but with AI on the horizon one may consider if graphics could add to the atmosphere of a game in specific cases.
The obvious next step for integrating graphics with text adventures is better integration with modern game engines like Unity, UE5, Godot, etc., like Ink has. I’ve asked about this on and off here before, and am on the verge of throwing together something hacky for Godot once I have a game idea that actually justifies it.
Amen! 
There used to be a Flexible Windows extension, but it’s notoriously difficult to make work.
On the choice side, isn’t combining text and images just a visual novel? ANd does RenPy count as a more mainstream engine since it’s written in python instead of being a purpose built language?
Granted, the thing I want is a way to #include a parser in a C++ terminal application and compile to zmachine or glulxe or some such… Not overly interested in graphics, but that’s kind of comes with the territory as a blind guy.
I sort of remember that. Thanks.
Hopefully the writing isn’t so bad that you click Fling myself into the furnace and then go “well, that wasn’t what I expected…” But I guess in certain types of games with visible stats you want choice notations like
Press the flashing red button. +2 Curiosity
This <kbd> tag is so cool! +10 Joy
There are choice narratives with images that aren’t VNs. @Grim (Grim Baccaris) makes stunning artistic Twine games such as Heretic's Hope by Grim Baccaris.
Visual Novels are kind of their own stylistic thing. Though there are different variations, usually a VN is presented as scenes that are like a paper doll play - there is a CG or photographic background, and characters are (usually) drawn sprites usually 3/4 view or waist-up that slide around. Their conversation in the bottom third of the screen is like subtitles and may or may not be voice-acted. Often the sprites are collaged so they can change facial expressions and can gesture and move their arms and flip sides. You can have multiple sprites on screen having conversations in this manner.
Again, there are variations, but Visual Novels tend to be watch/read/click to continue a lot to advance extensive dialogue scenes with occasional choices. Many take the form of time-management dating sims and the agency is deciding which character you’re going to spend limited time with to build an affinity with them. VNs almost always include a “fast forward till there’s something new” button as many enjoy replaying to see every plot branch and variation. Many VNs do also include unique interfaces and can have mini games.
Ren’Py is the most popular engine and is free to use, but there is also a commercial Visual Novel Maker program by the same people who created RPGMaker which does a lot more fancy things.
Exactly.
If this were the hot takes thread I might opine that most VNs aren’t IF at all, because the interaction (in the sense of choosing the plot) is the least important aspect.
Wait … this is the hot takes thread
An oversimplification, I know, but it’s definitely not the case that most choice-based IF with art is just a visual novel. There’s a huge amount of difference in both the frequency of choices, the depth of choices, and the stylistic presentation. It’s rare for most choice-based IF to allow fast-forward for example, because there’s usually a choice after every block of text.
Can my hot take be that interaction in the sense of choosing the plot is not a hallmark of IF? It’s more like “fiction you fiddle with”. Which might include plot choices or actions within a world model, or it might not.
I agree with this, and in the context of VNs, I would say that since kinetic novels (which have visuals and sound but no interaction other than “click to see the next block of text”) are a well-known and widely accepted part of that space, it follows, IMO, that the people who are including more significant interactive elements do consider those elements central to the narrative they want to share, even if the choices are infrequent or the plot doesn’t branch substantially.
@Grueslayer @HAL9000 - I integrated graphics in version 2.0 of my first Inform 7 game, The Time Machine (source available here) and I’m expanding my use of windows and graphics in my second game, The Island of Doctor Moreau (in-progress).
I have limited myself to using Inform 6M62 because some of the extensions I’m using don’t play well at this time with Inform 10.1.2. Here are the extensions that I’m using.
The Time Machine (left) | The Island of Doctor Moreau (right).
There are lots of ways to add graphics to IF without resembling a VN, and without needing to illustrate everything in a way that conflicts with or distracts from the representational power of text.
Things like overworld maps, graphical inventory screens, etc. can add a visual element while still allowing the actual action of the game to be primarily text-based. 80 Days is the obvious example of a game that works that way & has found success in mainstream game markets. Another option is graphics that abstractly represent certain states of the game (e.g. my Oregon Trail-like game Serum Run has generic “traveling” and “stopped” animations that change slightly to reflect weather), while still representing the actual gameplay events primarily in text.
Oh Bill, that looks so awesome… I’ll deep-dive into the source code as soon as I can!
My hot take on choice-based IF with graphics versus visual novels is that, even if the underlying technology is very similar (show a picture, print some text, user selects a choice, repeat), the genres have diverged enough that players will have very different expectations if a work is presented as an IF versus as a VN.
It’s like how there’s not really a technological difference between fanfic and published novels—they’re both displaying text, often divided into chapters—but readers searching for Sherlock Holmes stories on AO3 versus at Barnes and Noble will have very different expectations of what they’ll find.
Flexible Windows shouldn’t be hard to get working. The big issue in recent years has been that I had the questionable idea of breaking Glulx Entry Points up into sub extensions, requiring you to install 4 other extensions before Flexible Windows, which is a bit of a faff.
But the really good news is that those 4 extensions will all be built into the next release of Inform! Now I just have to update FW itself.
I’m also thinking of maybe making a new graphics extension to handle auto scaling image maps in windows.
One thing I’ve been working on right now is trying to get the location icons positioned correctly depending on the width of the map window (the location icons are drawn after the map using coordinates stored in a table for a specific map size). I do have some relative positioning code written but it still needs work.
Don’t know if the spec for your new graphics extension would handle something like this.
If you do decide to create such an Inform 7 extension, I don’t have any experience creating extensions but am willing to help out, even if it’s just testing.
I am only mentioning this because the discussion reached several posts – I was in a similar situation to Grueslayer 20 years ago and Hugo was a godsend when it came to easily putting up text, windows and graphics up. I think there is one restriction, where a program’s bottom-most window has to be the one that displays the game’s text, but that may be a bad memory.
Nikos Chantziaras’s work on the Hugor interpreter was also life-changing for me. Ok, apologies for the “ad”, I just think Hugo gets forgotten sometimes. 
