As a point of reference, you might want to try to dig up a copy of “Midsummer Tempest,” a novel by Poul Anderson. It’s literally a Shakespeare novel, and not just because of the title. At a certain point, as you’re reading along, you notice that while the conversations among the well-born characters are formatted as prose, the characters are all speaking in good iambic pentameter. The low-born characters, however, speak in prose.
6 Likes
My “five-act Shakespearian tragedy, in ten or so modules” is meant to be about ten hours of play time from five of the ten-to-twelve bits on offer, depending on the player’s choices. But I’m off chasing a different whale at the moment.
4 Likes
In my “to do” list for some far someday is a game tentatively labelled “Program 66”, in which you try to make the first Apollo moon landing happen, and you have to switch perspectives a lot to get the right decisions made. (There’s lots of backtracking into design meetings and tests, to make the final mission come out right.) And then in the end you have to try to get a marooned Soviet cosmonaut home, too, which involves switching into a whole bunch of Soviet personalities too.
But that’s at least two whales from now. 
4 Likes
I’m still a noob so I may actually make some of these projects one day, or they may fall by the wayside, but here goes:
-
A text adventure (in the Hinterlands campaign setting) about an amnesiac cultist trying to escape the humongous temple their sect occupies, all the while learning the disturbing truth about their own culture. I’ll save the details because I may make it someday, but it involves roaming NPCs and stealth mechanics.
-
A text adventure adaptation of the entirety of the novel Dracula, with lots of letters, journals, and changing POV characters.
-
A long form JRPG (in the Hinterlands campaign setting) called Hinterlands: Refuge about a refugee from a planet that has been destroyed by a Galactus-like entity. The game focuses on three harrowing days as the protagonist struggles to adapt to life in a big city on a foreign planet while political turmoil unfolds around them. Everything culminates in what I’d loosely describe as Astro Boy vs Godzilla. And I won’t spoil anything else.
8 Likes
Some folks did something like this in IFComp 2020. That they’re related wasn’t foregrounded, but if you search that page for “teresten” you’ll find it in the descriptions of three games…
6 Likes
As a wrestling fan, I really like this idea. I would pay actual money for this game.
4 Likes
I have a concept for space travel game where Pascal’s Wager is used as the core of a spaceship engine. Players need to alternatively “bliss” and “torment” the brain of Pascal himself, which they have in suspended animation, to triangulate the locations that they need to go to.
In theory the choices that are made in subpassages would add or subtract to Pascal’s brain state/the ship coordinates, but I need a way to make it not tedious and repetitive. Ideally there would be gambling minigames that adjust the values. And I need a plot too.
8 Likes
Your concept just blew my mind.
4 Likes
Haha, thank you. I might need to look for collaborators so if anyone has further ideas please get in touch.
2 Likes
Oh, I had missed this great thread. I’m only going to say the title and leave it there: 14 planets.
7 Likes
This sentence made me laugh:
It’s bleedin’ hilarious how you offhandedly mention they happen to have Pascal’s brain in suspended animation.
3 Likes
It’s bleedin’ hilarious how you offhandedly mention they happen to have Pascal’s brain in suspended animation.
In what I have of the plot so far, the player character actually doesn’t have Pascal’s brain. It’s Pascal’s brain that has them – they’re a teenager or child and it’s their legal guardian. Somehow I need to tie this in with Pascal’s presumable father issues with a dad that didn’t want him to learn math…and also preferably without touching religious aspects of fatherhood as much as possible.
6 Likes
will be interesting implementing it in Pascal (the programming language…) 
aside that bliss.pas and torment.pas are two nifty sourcefile name
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
5 Likes
Haha, I will have to work that in! I’ve heard of the language but I’m not much of a programmer beyond Twine and Inform. I’ll have to use it in a joke though.
3 Likes
Are you familiar with Pascal’s Wager ? (Completely different concept, but worth mentioning.)
4 Likes
Yeah, that was the idea behind the “bliss” and “torment.” I’m trying to work out some way to use chance-based minigames around that idea to progress the story.
3 Likes
Sorry, but did you realize that the “Pascal’s Wager” that BadParser linked is a game from Spring Thing 2008? (I say this because I almost skipped over it thinking it was a link toto Wikipedia or something, and I can’t tell from your response if you noticed…)
5 Likes
This binary choice just reminded me of a semi-game I always meant to write but didn’t. I have a Spring Thing backyard entry now!
@JoshGrams, I’ve had fun beating my head against Pascal’s Wager. Hopefully I will figure it out soon. It’s a creative premise, and the failures are funny.
Oh, back on topic? I’d like to write an Adventuron game with decent graphics. Graphics I made on my own. It wouldn’t have to be a big whale, but it would be neat to have done. Especially since I’m still trying to learn how to draw.
6 Likes
Sorry, but did you realize that the “Pascal’s Wager” that BadParser linked is a game from Spring Thing 2008? (I say this because I almost skipped over it thinking it was a link toto Wikipedia or something, and I can’t tell from your response if you noticed…)
Oh, I assumed that it was a Wikipedia link too. I will dig deeper.
2 Likes
Regarding Adventuron graphics, take a look at some of the existing games. They come in all sorts of styles. Some of the best include ‘Dungeons of Antur’ by Ricardo Oyón Rodríguez (done using a 3D modelling program, possibly Blender), ‘Sentient Beings’ by @Grizel (done using Canva), anything by John Blythe (hand-drawn bit-mapped graphics) and the wonderful Cryptex Hunt games, where most of the graphics were done by Errol Elumir (also hand-drawn bit-mapped graphics).
The graphics don’t need to be brilliant. I really like the simple graphics in ‘A Troll’s Revenge’ by @8bitAG. I think these were hand drawn, then scanned in black and white and coloured. I think Dee Cooke used a similar approach in ‘Barry Basic and the Quick Escape’.
6 Likes