I recently finished “World Conquest”, consisting, in fact, of two games, both played on a political map of the world. That’s right - you can navigate between all the countries of the world using compass directions, and even see the country’s flag if your interpreter supports images (so I hope you can appreciate how long it took me to implement!). Although it is implemented in Inform 6 (Glulx), the game is probably better thought of as a text-based RPG.
“Lost in Translation” is the larger of the two games. In it, you have to translate texts by moving between countries that speak the relevant languages, e.g. translating from German to Russian is as simple as moving from Germany through Poland to Russia. You get points from the translations, with which you can learn the languages of the world. The game doubles up, therefore, as a queryable database of 292 of the world’s languages (the ones with more than ~1.5 million speakers).
“Icelandic Conquest” is simpler: you just have to get Iceland to take over the world. Iceland has no army of its own, so the method of doing this is to plant the Icelandic flag in a country. You get flags by making deliveries across the globe (testing your geographical awareness!) - and you get more flags for making quicker deliveries.
In addition to these games there is also a “pure exploration” mode for travelling the world without pressure, as well as a few mini-games (quizzes).
If this sounds intriguing, do try the game(s) out and do submit bug reports (though I might not get around to fixing the bugs for a while).
I wonder if there are other experiments with RPG-like games implemented with IF authoring systems?
This is… interesting. Can I suggest editing your first post to sell your game a bit more? Explain what it’s about and so on. This map does seem to be quite a feat, so well done on that.
But, as impressive a logic (or geographical) puzzle as this is, I couldn’t help thinking it would be better (in terms of being more fun, and also in terms of being a better educational tool) with a bit of character or even storyline to it. As it is, it really does just feel like playing around with symbols on a map, but I think you could potentially make it more interesting than that. Why not change the flags to microfilms or something and make that game about espionage, for example?
The only bug I’ve found so far is that SUB behaves a bit weirdly outside of the point when you’re told to use it.
And on a geographic note, you could SUB the UK up into a few different regions, speaking Gaelic and Welsh and so on, but I guess that’s true of a lot of countries and it could get a bit silly for you.
Well, thank you for your comment! I linked to the web page that explains what both games are about, so I thought I’d keep the forum post brief.
Then you should probably play a bit further into Lost in Translation… (Icelandic Conquest is, indeed, void of plot, given its ridiculousness, but I suppose it wouldn’t be too difficult to add more zest to it.)
Personally I think it’d be more fun if it were graphical. More people would probably play it and, given the complexity of the thing, it would probably be easier to see what’s going on. But I lack the skills to do graphical games.
If you look at your inventory, you’ll see that the deliveries do have an identity (and one of them is microchip, I think). I’m not sure it would work without flags, though, because the idea is that placing a flag in a country claims it for yourself, which is supposed to be a kind of dig at colonialism and the territorial ‘games’ of the 19th and 20th centuries.
It’s only really relevant to Lost in Translation. Can you elaborate on the bug?
Yes, I could, but the way I designed it was that only languages with greater than about 1.5 million speakers would get their own region, and, although you can learn Welsh and Scottish Gaelic (in the game), they don’t have as many speakers as that.
Although people may not click that link unless you give them a sufficiently good reason first.
On further experimentation, it seems to work in every game except Icelandic Conquest, where it responds with “That isn’t a valid country.” to every country (except Iceland, which it says I don’t need to refer to).
Going back to this question:
The answer is plenty have tried, but few if any have been successful. The Reliques of Tolti-Aph is perhaps the best known and regarded, and it has its critics. Victor Gijsbers is working on something that looks very promising, though.
EDIT: I should add, I don’t think there’s anything inherently difficult about creating an IF RPG, at least compared to creating any other kind.
There is a rather large series of IF RPG games, look up ‘Eamon’ on IFDB (and I’ve downloaded your games, and will have time to play them soon – looks interesting!).
Great - thanks for the suggestions. I’ve updated my initial post, and I’ll look into that bug at some point (but in comparison to some of my earlier bugs, it’s minor!)
