This is the first time I spend so much time on paper. I’m going to start coding even if I haven’t fully completed the game design. I chose The Quill, it’s not the easiest one, but I’d like to see…
The homepage of the game jam is very well done and gives a lot of information, but it can be a bit intimidating: “Will I be able to live up to it!”
The home page is intended to provide useful advice for programmers that are new to text adventures. For people like yourself, you will know most of this and can skim over it.
I've used AdventureWriter recently. This is the same as The Quill, but for Apple II, Atari 8-bit, C64 and PC. It's a very capable system, but it has a lot of limitations compared to modern systems, and only has a two-word parser. In my case, I was porting some old Spectrum ZX adventures to the Atari 8-bit. The memory constraints were hard to work around. In one case, I had to make room descriptions more concise to get it to fit. In the end, I only had about 20 bytes to spare in that game.
