Make a Text Adventure Game

Inspired by yesterday’s lecture by Nika Bertram and Jens Ohlig about text adventure games. I woke up and the first thing I did was play Reconnaissance at Finowfurt which is a text adventure in the tradition of zork. I grew up playing these kinds of games and they hold a special place in my heart.

Reconnaissance at Finowfurt is a game that is set here at Chaos Communication Camp 2007 and it took me about an hour to play. If you’re interested, first go download a text adventure game viewer (mac, unix) and then download the game and you’re off!

As I was finishing the game, Jens coincidentally showed up and I got to talk to him about text adventures and the future of mashing up text adventure games with ARGs. After expressing an interest in learning how to make a text adventure game, he got me set up with Inform 7 to make a super simple text adventure game adaptation of Charlie the Unicorn. It’s a really interesting programing language because it parses and compiles English!

As a beginning programmer, this was easy to navigate with some over the shoulder help. With only a day or two of walking through the example code, you could have a game up and running pretty quick. The trick would become writing an awesome adventure rather than learning code. I found this tutorial for you if you don’t have a Jens to walk you through. If you make a geeky text adventure game, make sure to drop a link to it in the comments! – Link

The latest flickr photos from Chaos Communication Camp 2007 are here: – Link