Hi everyone, For quite a while I have been thinking of trying my hand at some simple text adventure games and maybe eventually work my way up to some sort of game like Nethack, Ancient Domains of Mystery, or maybe even as complex as Entombed. As most of you know i use Linux most of the time, and the majority of accessible games are text adventures. So this would be a logical place to start since such games are relatively inexpensive and easy to make, and usually are cross-platform too. Of course, there is various text adventure systems like Inform, Adrift, Tads, etc but I've been thinking of writing them in a traditional programming language like C, Java, or Python. Anyway,before I even think of the technical details there are some things about the user interface I'd like to get your input on.
First thing, is input. Most of the text adventures out there use various commands like "grab sword," "grab torch," "light torch.," etc. I could continue this tridition, but it seams to me there is an easier way to do this. For example, what if you pressed g for grab item, and then a menu popped up with a list of items in the room. You could then select the item you want to grab from a list. This would save a bunch of typing by effectively doing the same thing. For moving around the level asining directions to n for north, s for south, e for east, and w for west would certainly be preferable to ttyping out "north," "south," "east," or "west." What do you think about this approach? Second, is output. Again there is a couple of ways of doing this. We could certainly have everything be printed directly out to the console, text directly to the screen, which you can use your screen reader for. The other way is to use a Speech API like Sapi, Speech-dispatcher, etc that would automatically read out the information on the screen. This would make the games slightly less portable, but would have the advantage of automatic speech output by default. Any thoughts weather you would like to use a screen reader or use Sapi directly? Finally, we get down to the technical details. As I said I am well aware of Inform and Adrift, but in many ways those text adventure systems are not quite as flexable enough for what I want to do. If I wanted to create a multilevel dungeon like Entombed they would fall short pretty fast. That leaves me with the option of using a language like C/C++ or something else. At the moment I'm thinking of C/C++ because if written correctly the games should be fairly easy to recompile for other platforms and devices. While Java and Python have their advantages too if I wanted to port these games to cell phones, note takers, it wouldn't necessarily be as easy to do. However, the advantage of Python or Java would be I could hit the big three platforms Windows, Mac, or Linux with one easy swoop without having to recompile anything. Any thoughts? Cheers! --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.