Hello I’m new to the current IF scene although I have tinkered with writing ‘text adventures’ (are you still allowed to call them that?) since the days of the VIC 20 where I avidly played the Scott Adams adventure games. I was thinking of creating an ‘IF’ game but am unsure where this genera sits now. Is it strictly text only? I’ve heard of narrative based hyperlink games also been described as IF. If so, this seams quite a big departure from verb/noun based parser games. So to what degree are graphics ‘allowed’ nowadays?
I know these are all things I can google, but I find it’s usually much better to get answers directly from the people involved. I did write an engine for making IF (text adventure) games using C# and XNA quite a few years ago, but abandoned the project when XNA was dropped.
The way we generally run things here, a work is IF if people call it IF. That can include graphics, audio, hyperlinks, text parsers…anything that’s meant to be in dialogue with the field of IF as a whole. Normally this also means being primarily text, but there have been some exceptions to this!
So old-school text adventures count, hyperlink narrative games count, VNs generally don’t count because the VN community and the IF community are pretty separate and there’s not a lot of back-and-forth between them.
As far as the title question, most people use existing systems, because it’s a lot of work to make a new system and make a good work of IF in your new system. But there are plenty of exceptions to this, and we welcome experiments!
“Text adventure” is still a valid term to distinguish that style of game from all the other styles of interactive fiction. The two big comps for text adventures are probably Text Adventure Literacy Jam and ParserComp.
Illustrated text adventures are not very common, simply because there is no good authoring tool that supports graphics (and sound) and can be compiled to one of the common file formats. You can do it in Inform 6 and Inform 7 compiled to Glulx, but it’s hard work and Glulx is not supported by retro platforms. You can also do it in ADRIFT (I think), but anyone using graphics for text adventures is more likely to use DAAD (for retro platforms) or Adventuron.
About a year ago, I did a search for “text adventures” on GitHub. I didn’t find any new games, but what I did find was over 100 text adventure engines, most of which were unfinished and (from memory) I don’t think any of them had ever been used to create a complete playable game. That should tell you something.
My gut feel is that maybe 1% of all modern text adventures are written with a custom engine and a smaller percentage of those would use graphics.
I spend most of my time looking at the Interactive Fiction Competition to see what’s going on, and they designate hyperlink based games as “choice” games and parser games as parser. I believe this year it’s a nearly 50/50 split, so both coexist. Recalling last year, I think one game was made with a system the author made, and all others used existing systems
This is contrary to my understanding; the two communities are generally pretty separate, but VNs are welcome in all IF events, and there are a decent amount of VNs listed on IFDB!
That may have been a poor choice of words on my part. It’s not that VNs are banned from IFComp or anything, just that the two have evolved in different directions for long enough that VNs don’t tend to be what IF judges are looking for and vice versa. (They have more emphasis on art and visual effects, for example, and “click to continue” is omnipresent, which I’ve seen games get dinged for in the IFComp reviews this year.)
But I have no real presence in the VN community, so I could be wrong about all of this!
I would say most people here use existing game systems of some type. We do have people creating game systems, but development on those is usually slow.
There’s always a niche for text adventures of every type you’ve probably played. Programming your own parser or game system from the ground up isn’t necessary unless you are really interested in doing that.
If you like verb-noun Scott Adams style, you might enjoy GrueScript.
verb-noun with pictures; Adventuron
If you want to make a game like Zork I’d recommend Inform, TADS or Dialog
You can preview these online:
Some unique examples of IF with graphics and media or unique interaction
Visual Novels are a brand of IF and certainly welcome - I’ve judged one that was entered in IFComp several years ago, but VNs don’t get discussed here a lot because there are other forum communities that have more specific assistance for those types of games. The VN fanbase usually are specifically devoted to those.
The common engine for Visual Novels is Ren’Py
While pure text IF is not a huge market commercially, a lot of the technology is often put to use as components of other larger games for conversation systems, prototyping, story and world-state tracking.
Choice of Games and Inkle are the best examples of commercial game publishers that grew out of Interactive Fiction roots. Failbetter’s Fallen London is an online card-based interactive narrative that has been running for 15 years. They have employed many IF authors.
Although there are a lot of text adventure authors on this forum (including me), most of the text adventure discussions take place outside this community on Discord, Telegram, Facebook groups and various platform-specific or authoring-system-specific forums.
Most text adventure authors work in a vacuum and you don’t know they’re working on anything until something suddenly pops up on itch.io or one of the afore-mentioned communities.
For a list of the commonly-used authoring systems for text adventures, see the home page for Text Adventure Literacy Jam 2025. This includes links to downloads.
I think your best choice for text adventures with graphics is probably Adventuron. This has some good documentation, is pretty easy to learn and has an active Discord server. As it’s strongly influenced by early authoring systems like The Quill and PAWS, it’s really good at two-word parsers, but there’s no reason why you can’t use a multi-word parser with a bit of extra effort. I’ve written five games in Adventuron. Three of these use a multi-word parser and four of these have graphics.
Nowadays, I use Inform 6 with the PunyInform library. This allows you to write Infocom-like games, but it’s text only. You can run these in a browser or on any platform that has a Z-code interpreter, which is just about every computer on the planet.
If you want to write everything from scratch (not recommended, personally), check out the games by Jim MacBrayne. These are written in BASIC using QB64 (or something like that).
Graphics in adventures have been a “thing” since 1980’s Mystery House, but it seems like the first-person illustrated adventure almost instantly died out with the release of King’s Quest, being displaced that style of third-person, text-light, and eventually point-and-click game. Kind of weird how abruptly it happened, but I guess that style allowed for new types of puzzles (like the tentacle alien in Space Quest). I wonder what the last commercial “illustrated text adventure” in the Rendezvous with Rama style was. It makes sense that this type of game would have become less common though: since a picture doesn’t say anything you can’t say with a thousand words, it’s the first thing you’d cut if you wanted to save some effort.
Magnetic Scroll’s Fish! was 1988. In fact their entire run was post-King’s Quest: The Pawn in 1985, Guild of Thieves and Jinxter were 1987, and Corruption and Fish! were 1988. Myth was released in 1989, but it a promotional thing for the fan club.
This was pretty much the Legend house style, all the way through to when things clicked over from text-games with illustrations to graphic adventures with words. 1993’s Gateway 2 was I think the last of the former that they did, so I think that has a plausible claim to the title.
Hardly. Sierra On-line sort of pioneered the annoying point ‘n’ click and joystick interface, but the rest of the text adventure world continued on with the tried and true. King’s Quest was released in 1984. From this point on, Level 9 continued releasing all their games with graphics, Trillium/Telarium started releasing games like Fahrenheit 451, Magnetic Scrolls came onto the scene with The Pawn et al from 1985, Interplay Productions released games like Borrowed Time from 1985, even Infocom had a go at it. Companies like Enigma Variations, CRL Group, St. Bride’s School, Delta 4, Image Tech, Adventure International (UK), Polarware and many more developed illustrated text adventures after 1984.
The Europeans, and especially the French, were really big on illustrated text adventures with companies like ERE Informatique and Loriciels, although some of these bordered on the experimental with mouse-driven interfaces to select the verb and noun, somewhat like a transition between text-only and point ‘n’ click.
Now, if we ignore the purely commercial aspect, there were also the budget labels, shareware and public domain games that were prevalent in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Programs like GAC, STAC and others allowed Joe and Jill Bloggs to write their own games with graphics and these were very, very popular.
And some of my friends started opening their VN jams to IF as well so I’d say that some common points might be slowly forming, which I see as a really good thing.
I think Legend was the last big studio to use that format. (Crimson Diamond is delightful but it’s a deliberate callback to a lost age.)
Well, obviously, Legend took the route of cutting out the words (and the parser) and establishing themselves as a graphical adventure company.
But you want to cut something. Providing two complete interfaces to the same game is a bad road to be on. Pick one – preferably the better one, because there’s no way they are exactly equivalent – and put your effort into that.
I don’t think you’re wrong about how VNs work, but:
This may be true for IFComp specifically, but VNs seem pretty prevalent in other IF events in my experience! I’ve seen them in IF jams, in Spring Thing, in the Short Games Showcase, etc., and as far as I can tell players of those events are as open to them as to any other works.
