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Retro adventure game in the making—Point and click or text parser?

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rtrooney - 03 September 2019 06:34 PM
Karlok - 03 September 2019 06:07 PM

They were amazing *in those days*. (The early Infocom games had terrible parsers though. Remember Zork?) Legend parsers were even better. But my point was that it’s kind of weird to recommend ancient parsers to a developer in 2019.

I agree wholeheartedly. It’s why I question the reasoning behind “recommending” ancient graphics in 2019.

Because there are many players who like older graphics better.
The two top games of 2018 according to a big french newspaper were Celeste and Obra Dinn, ie two games that are using older graphics.

     

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Karlok - 03 September 2019 05:13 AM
Owly - 01 September 2019 03:22 PM

IF is text only right, no graphics? I find it so cool you still enjoy them. I will check modern IF and see how they handle the text parser. Any title in particular you recommend?

If you want to get an idea of modern text adventures and parsers, Andrew Plotkin and Emily Short have done amazing things. But personally I’d go for point-and-click.

Thanks, I’ll look them up!

Though certainly after reading all this I’m more inclined to go with point and click, I think.

     

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Mikekelly - 03 September 2019 06:48 AM

Point and click. I actually like 16 bit retro games. Do the interface right and they are worth playing.

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I love them! Thanks, this is encouraging.

     

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Ninth - 04 September 2019 06:02 AM
rtrooney - 03 September 2019 06:34 PM
Karlok - 03 September 2019 06:07 PM

They were amazing *in those days*. (The early Infocom games had terrible parsers though. Remember Zork?) Legend parsers were even better. But my point was that it’s kind of weird to recommend ancient parsers to a developer in 2019.

I agree wholeheartedly. It’s why I question the reasoning behind “recommending” ancient graphics in 2019.

Because there are many players who like older graphics better.
The two top games of 2018 according to a big french newspaper were Celeste and Obra Dinn, ie two games that are using older graphics.

Also, though not from 2018, I loved the pixelated art style of The Last Door (though obviously using more than 16 colours.)

 

     
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Ninth - 04 September 2019 06:02 AM

Because there are many players who like older graphics better.
The two top games of 2018 according to a big french newspaper were Celeste and Obra Dinn, ie two games that are using older graphics.

I don’t know about Celeste, but Obra Dinn would have been a good game even if it had been drawn with crayons on a sidewalk. Graphics had nothing to do with how well made of a game it was.

     
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tomimt - 04 September 2019 05:14 PM
Ninth - 04 September 2019 06:02 AM

Because there are many players who like older graphics better.
The two top games of 2018 according to a big french newspaper were Celeste and Obra Dinn, ie two games that are using older graphics.

I don’t know about Celeste, but Obra Dinn would have been a good game even if it had been drawn with crayons on a sidewalk. Graphics had nothing to do with how well made of a game it was.

That, and Obra Dinn’s graphics are a modern take on retro graphics, NOT old graphics.

     

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Karlok - 03 September 2019 06:07 PM

They were amazing *in those days*. (The early Infocom games had terrible parsers though. Remember Zork?) Legend parsers were even better. But my point was that it’s kind of weird to recommend ancient parsers to a developer in 2019.

Well, in all honesty, I haven’t played any of the new breed of text adventures, as the genre in general interest me very little. I can only make recommendations as far as my own personal knowledge of the genre goes and it stops there in the 90s.

And he is aiming to make a retro game in the style of Sierra, so I assume he is at least passingly familiar with Sierra’s parser, which never was good. So if he is dwelling in the past, it just makes sense to point out that there already were developers doing a far better job with parsers than Sierra.

But as I did mention, I do think he should go with the point and click instead. It’s just all-around simpler unless he finds and engine that already does parser well out from the box or he is willing to spend some time in trying to make a solid parser engine.

     

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tomimt - 04 September 2019 05:14 PM

I don’t know about Celeste, but Obra Dinn would have been a good game even if it had been drawn with crayons on a sidewalk. Graphics had nothing to do with how well made of a game it was.

Sure, but that means people either don’t care if a game has retro graphics if it’s good, or like them even better for it.

So it makes perfect sense to choose to go retro, if that’s the way one’s sees one’s own future game. It might chase off some people, sure, but many others will want to buy it (providing it’s a good game regarless, that is).

     
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Well, in all honesty, I haven’t played any of the new breed of text adventures, as the genre in general interest me very little. I can only make recommendations as far as my own personal knowledge of the genre goes and it stops there in the 90s.

I’m surprised that people whose personal knowledge of something stops in the 90s and who are not interested in that something, feel the urge to make recommendations.

TimovieMan - 04 September 2019 05:18 PM

[...] and Obra Dinn’s graphics are a modern take on retro graphics, NOT old graphics.

Exactly. And the old games with old graphics were not 3D either, but Obra Dinn is. No modern developer in his right mind uses ancient engines, software, parsers.

     

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By the way, point and click is no “retro”.

     

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Karlok - 04 September 2019 08:03 PM

I’m surprised that people whose personal knowledge of something stops in the 90s and who are not interested in that something, feel the urge to make recommendations.

Now you are just being argumentative for the sake of being argumentative, so let’s drop this, shall we?

     
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Karlok - 04 September 2019 08:03 PM

I’m surprised that people whose personal knowledge of something stops in the 90s and who are not interested in that something, feel the urge to make recommendations.

Now you are just being argumentative for the sake of being argumentative, so let’s drop this, shall we?

Actually, I feel I made an excellent point. And all anybody who doesn’t want to discuss a subject has to do is ignore it. (Example: Refusing to reply to repeated requests to use spoiler tags.) But one thing that doesn’t work is telling other people what to do. (Example: Repeatedly posting requests to use spoiler tags.)

     

See you around, wolf. Nerissa

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Karlok - 03 September 2019 06:07 PM
Phlebas - 03 September 2019 11:56 AM

Having grown up playing text adventures on the Spectrum, with 48K of memory and corresponding limits on parser vocabulary and sophistication: Yes, the Infocom parsers were amazing.

They were amazing *in those days*. (The early Infocom games had terrible parsers though. Remember Zork?) Legend parsers were even better. But my point was that it’s kind of weird to recommend ancient parsers to a developer in 2019.

A lot of Spectrum games used a strict verb-noun format, including those created with The Quill (the AGS of that era). Some used that format to fake more sophisticated input (I remember Ship of Doom required INSERT KEY and INTO HOLE as separate commands - in fact you could skip the first to save a move) or had custom parsers with their own flavours of awfulness (CUT BONDS BLADE, with no WITH, was one infamous solution). And with only 48k to store the game and its entire vocabulary there was often a lot of verb-guessing and many games only looked at the first few letters of each word entered.

So yes, I remember Zork. It was way ahead of what I was used to Smile

The jump from Infocom games (certainly the later ones, at any rate) to Graham Nelson, Andrew Plotkin and the current state of IF was much smaller - Hadean Lands introduced some great usability features and there’s been some interesting work with more specialized parsers for certain games, but general-purpose parsing of simple commands was really pretty good already.

Thinking about it, for a retro-styled game a simple verb-noun input might be surprisingly effective - you could avoid verb-guessing frustration by either giving it a big vocabulary with plenty of synonyms or (as some games did back in the day) having a help page with a list of verbs.

     
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Addendum: Good grief! I’ve just looked up Ship of Doom and discovered it was written by…
Charles Cecil!
THE Charles Cecil!
I had no idea.

     

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Choose the one that best serves your gameplay. That said, gameplay will probably not be served by an interface similar to, say, Space Quest 2.

In general, I would lean towards two possibilities: text-only with no graphics (pure text adventure), or pure graphical interface. A Legend-style “graphic window + text window” interface also works.

I absolutely love text adventures, both classic and modern. I also love point-and-click adventures. However, the “type text and move around” early Sierra interface has always felt clumsy to me. In a text adventure, the text IS the story, and typing text is a natural way to interact with it - especially with a parser on the level of Infocom’s or better (such as more modern Inform and TADS 3 parsers). In a graphic adventure, using icons to click on the graphics is feels similarly integrated. Grafting a text parser onto a graphic adventure is… not ideal; there’s a reason Sierra left it behind.

There are a few cases where I think “text parser + graphical 1980’s Sierra-style interface” could work now, especially if you included auto-complete.

* A game where typing is absolutely central to the gameplay. If you had a game where you controlled an abstracted character in a 1980’s vision of cyberspace, and the commands were all abstract system commands and executables, this would feel immersive.

* A game where command guessing is REALLY central to gameplay. I’m not sure how this would be fun, but I guess a riddle-heavy game, or a game where you had to construct magic spells out of syllables…? Or a game where some rooms cause you to only be allowed to use words beginning with certain letters, as in the text adventure Ad Verbum?

*  A game that has some sort of meta-joke about the history of adventure games, and starts out as pure text, then becomes parser + graphics, then becomes graphical, and so on.

These are very specialized cases. Unless your gameplay justifies it, go for pure text with no graphics, or pure graphical interface with icons/hotspots/etc.

     

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