I’m personally aiming for “Zork, but in space and red”, and have spent most of my time thus far trying to make it look all fancy and make the keyword highlighting work properly.
I’m making it in Unity 2021 w/ HDRP, if only because it makes adding bloom and assorted post-processing tiddlywinks trivial, and I think that the weird phosphor-delay-y effect caused by the fancy anti-aliasing that I accidentally left on looked pretty cool.
As for “plot” or “theme” (silly things), the game takes place on a space station controlled by an aging biological processor after most of the crew was killed by a virus or whatever. I haven’t quite gotten it down yet. Just the whole “brain space station” thing, really.
Happy debugging!
here is a silly screenshot featuring balls
Hello BlackRaiinbow!
Nice project that in honour of your childhood :D
I would say that the best place to ask this would be some of the specific "Parser Games" forums (also knowns as "Interactive Fiction").
In English language i visit IntFiction.org. I'm sure that you will be able to find there all the information you need, and more voices and better prepared than mine ^.^
There you will also find information about other Parser competitions, and about many games. I also recommend you visit previous years ParserComp Jam games to see how they work.
Just to be curious, where are you from? As far as I know we already have Spanish (myself) and Swedish people arround here :)
Tell us if you finally move foward with the project!
AZ
Good luck with your game. Start with something small or you'll run out of time. The text adventure community is small, but very active and there's always someone that can help you out. Here's a few links to get you started:
Forum for help, competitions, requests for beta testers and anything IF related: https://intfiction.org/
Database of IF games: https://ifdb.org/
Archive of (mostly modern) IF games: http://www.ifarchive.org/
Database of game maps and solutions: https://solutionarchive.com/
General info on IF: https://www.ifwiki.org/Main_Page
The most recently finished comp with parser games written for beginners: Text Adventure Literacy Jam 2022
ParserComp 2021: https://itch.io/jam/parsercomp-2021
Welcome to the jam!
The other replies give you all the information you need to get started. If you're planning to use an existing game engine rather than rolling your own, I recommend Adventuron as it's beginner friendly and quite easy to get a game up and running quickly (and there's an active Discord community).
Good luck!
Taking breaks seems to be necessary--it often helps me take a step back. Plus sometimes I get sick of my own games and say "you know what I'd like to do, if I could?" After a day or two, sometimes I find it.
The key is not to have too much empty time between features added/bug fixes.
Looks like you made it in, so congratulations!
Thank you so much! I wanted to do a much bigger puzzle for the city, adding more characters and more intricate stuff to do, but I barley managed to implement the ending in the last 20 mins.... well, at least I submitted something! For 4 effective days of work, I say not bad! I learned an engine and made a -somewhat- functioning game!
Wasn't there a chess game last year called fivebyfivia delenda est? Oh wait, never mind, that was you.
Yes, thanks for remembering! The middle game, I submitted to IFComp. It was called Fourbyfourian Quarryin'. I'm pleased to have combined two things I enjoyed very much, but I just think any serious complexity in a chess game/text adventure would be take too much energy. It's hard enough to determine legal moves, but tying it into any sort of narrative puts too much in a pile at once!
