What are the problems of text-based games? What are the problems of developers who are trying to create their state-of-the-art text adventures? Maybe this type of games is dead? I think this topic is very interesting. Moreover, almost every modern computer game contains some text, dialogs, lore, any kind of descriptions so this article will not be only useful for developres of text quests and writers of interactive fiction.

Posted by DarkForestCrow on Aug 20th, 2016 - Intermediate Design/Concepts

Hello, indiedb guys!

This post is a summary of my thoughts about development of games with text processing, mosty about problems that you may face when you deal with such type of games. Attention! Overdose of oldfags' stuff!

I think every creative process starts with problems. When you want to create something - the amount of problems you solve every day grows exponentially. If you know your problems, you have a chance to succeed.

So, you want to create your text-based adventure game or any game with text processing. If you want to create it for yourself and your friends only (joke, developers of text-based games have no friends), then you just develop it. Then one or two guys in the world play it. Everybody is happy.



But what if you want to create something enjoyable for more than just one miserable person who plays your game only because he feels sorry for you (actually because he thinks you are a psycho who can do something bad if he will not check your game out)?

You have a lot of problems then, son

My face when I start yet another text-based adventure development



Because, guess what, text-based game is a text-based game and you are not a Hemingway. You need good writings, you need a good plot, you need some compelling characters, you need good additional interesting mechanics ideas. Just go to textadventures.co.uk and launch some games - you will see a lot of problems. I hope.



Some games there have good stories but awful writings and awful English (even worse than mine). Some have perfect English but boring plot and obscure characters (usually no characters at all). Others have good plot and good English but simple and boring mechanics of typical 4-ways-to-go text adventures. Who is the audience of these games? Like with any other type of games, you have three main circles of players:



1.) Creator of the game.

It's not as bad as you may think (and even not that bad as I think). Some writers write novels just to read them after a year or so. Art for a single person in the world is still an art.



2.) Creators of the games of similiar type.

Interactive fiction community is the best example in this case: they use similiar tools, they write their games, they play their games. Community is pretty closed and bounded (I am not saying this is bad).



3.) Usual gamers.

Mmmmm...usual gamers...Millions of players...success.



You can easily reach the audience of type 1 and 2, but what about type 3? Do you have some awesome pixelart pictures with landscapes and characters to impress those people? Do you have some insane chiptune soundtracks? Voice acting? Maybe you have beautiful animation?

No



You have text. Player writes some text as an input and the game displays some text as an answer. Nothing more.

Check this image:

Just compare the text 'I really like you' and the image of the girl itself.



Now pretend that the image of cute girl was removed and we have text only. 'I really like you'. We can add some descriptions of course - we can describe the roam, the girl, her clothes, her smile, but with image you don't need to do this (and you don't have 100 words per replic that noone will read).

Probably, you have a good story. Maybe some plot twists. Decent dialogs. But you can't show your compelling story or charming characters. You can tell something interesting about your game but it's not easy at all to impress people using text only. Especially in modern world of powerful graphics engines and pixelart freaks (I love them).



Even if your game has decent storyline, compelling characters and good writing (perfect example of bad writing is this blog. Joke, this blog is the best.), probability of success is still low. And if your writing is poorly done, cool landscapes and voice acting will not save you - because you have no graphics and no sound at all.



What about visual novels? - well, this can be a good choice for your state-of-the-art story/dialogs-driven game. Community of visual novels players is larger than interactive fiction players community (I am not even sure if IF-players community is alive. Joke) Add pretty faces of characters painted by decent artist, add sexy voice of your cousin and - voila - the best game of all time is ready.



It's not that easy in real world. There are hundreds of visual novels with awesome arts and ourstanding voice acting - and with writing that looks like a writing of a retarded monkey translated via google (again, this blog) With stories that are so primitive that you think 'One more word and my brain is dead'.



So, good story is a must-have for text-based game. Suppose that we already have it.



What other kinds of problems do we have?

- We have text only but still text processing component of the game is poor



Usually it looks like this:

Part of my conversation with Galatea



Game understands 'go north' but fails to process 'lets go north'. Game understands 'look' but can't process 'look around'.

It's not only poor natural language processing but the traditional mechanics of such type of games itself - it's a tradition in IF community to let player say 'go north' but to forget about processing of other types of this phrase like 'I want to go North'. Just start to play Make it Good or any other interactive fiction game here and you will understand what I am talking about.



Your game has no graphics, no sound - and still it can't even process input strings that are slightly different from the strings that are direct orders - well, how can we say then that your game is a true text-based game?

- Limitations of frameworks



Almost every framework (Inform/Twine/...) for IF development has typical and simple understanding of what is a text-based game: such kind of a game must have rooms with a maximum of 4 doors or directions like north, south, west, east; such kind of a game must have 'look' and 'examine' mechanics; if you want to add roleplay to your game you better shoot yourself instead of doing this.

These framework will not let you create your own game world - because creators of these frameworks surprisingly can't understand that 'text-based' doesn't mean 'has simple mechanics and primitive world model'.

Perfect text-based adventure engine after a couple of your patches



If you want to achieve something complex and unique, you will most likely rewrite these frameworks.

- No real characters



That's right, guys, I reviewed Galatea recently and, actually, this is the best example of NPC in interactive fiction we have right now. Such a shame.

You can't say 'Hello, girl. How are you? What is your name?', you need to write ugly stuff like 'Ask X about Y' and repeat it again and again for any kinds of things you want to discuss.

No, no. You can't flirt with NPC. You can only 'examine her' and 'go north'



And it's not only the result of poor functionality of IF development frameworks I must admit.

Summary of main problems I see so far



1.) Poor natural language processing capabilities.

2.) Primitive gameplay.

3.) Primitive characters or even no 'real' characters at all.

Solutions



Modern text-based game must contain not only decent storytelling and writing, but also it must:



1.) Implement game mechanics that is more complex than just 'man goes through some rooms and examines things'

2.) Have at least one compelling NPC with opportunities to chat and opportunities to establish relationships.

3.) Offer natural language processing (it's a text-based game so one of the main tasks is to process text, surprisingly for typical IF authors)

Text-based game that understands 'hello' but can't understand 'hello, how are you? Do you like me?' fails one of the main tasks of text-based game - text processing. It was 'okay' 30 years ago. But now you need something more to impress players.

That's all for now. Some of you may say 'you can only criticize things. If you are so smart - go and create your perfect text adventure'. Well, my Dark Forest: Reborn project is in development :)

I hope some of you will find a bit of useful information in this post. Maybe it will help you to create a game that will be unique and that will not follow typical text adventure pattern.

Do you think authors of visual novels have their solutions for these problems? Visual novels have huge audience. Maybe text-adventures are just obsolete and interactive fiction community is dead? Share your opinion!