[Ironshanks]

Well I would like a menu-driven text RPG. Seems like it would be the same literary style but without the hassle.
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That's not a broken link, it's a PICTURE of a broken link. It's really very conceptual.

[barok@home]

well, maybe one day i'll revive it for something to do...

[UscGradEray]

[Guest]

[The Anarchist]

Christ, forgot to log in. That was me up there ^.
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Some may know me as MidnightDreamer... time for a namechange.
blackgc.f2g.net

[fingersmith]

I think you people have hit it on the head there! Navigation and the verb guessing syndrome are definitely two of the worst things with text adventures.

A map of roughly where the character is I think is essential. I am also considering dividing the playing area into regions and areas which are organised in a grid fashion and the player would always be told which grid they are in to give them a sense of whereabouts. Navigation would come down to moving from one area to the next and these would be big enough to prevent the player getting too lost. It doesn't bode well with the old cave adventures where everything is simply "your in a cave underground", but in a well structured fantasy land with towns containing districts, mountain ranges, different types of forests, rivers and other landmarks, it ought to be easy to promote a sense of whereabouts.

The verb problem is a difficult one, my personal thoughts on this are that it needs to be kept simple. A few simple commands to interact with the game environment.
To help with the verb guessing problem, like any game that needs to be learnt, I think a tutorial is a good thing. A player is coming into this world with absolutely no clues as to what to type. So rewards could be rewarded for completing the tutorial and these could be presented as small starter quests. Some easy modules might be; movement and navigation, looking around and searching the area, fighting and spell casting, picking up things and using items, and NPC interaction!

I think the depth to textual interfaces should come not in a wide range of possible ways to achieve the same thing (light lamp, use lamp, use match on lamp, turn on lamp) or wacky and complex phrases to solve puzzles. Instead items, areas, npcs and quests which can be identified by name and should be supported in an interactive and diverse manner. In other words, if the player types something relevant, then they've done the hard bit of picking up on the clues and should be rewarded. So no matter who they talk to or where they are, the player is pointed in the right direction. When asking about a quest for example, a diverse range of npcs should be able to help you out or point you in the right direction. Thereby the discovery element comes not from hunting for the right NPC and then being presented with the right menu choice or relevant response, it comes from picking up on names and phrases and have all sorts of npcs give you clues that your onto something or intelligent enough responses to tell you've picked up on a quest of some sort.

[Ironshanks]

I was thinking of a sidebar with common verbs (use, pickup, examine) etc. that you could click on, and then click on any noun in the current text display to use it on that thing.

I don't know, maybe that would be too dumbed down for people?
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That's not a broken link, it's a PICTURE of a broken link. It's really very conceptual.

[Modanung]

In the old days, me and Bjorn... ok, mostly Bjorn... used to draw the maps ourselves. Actually that was a lot more fun.
We still have the maps of Solstice, Korenvliet, Super Mario Bros. and some gamble combinations of Super Mario Bros. 3. Korenvliet was the only textadventure, a Dutch one, but Solstice didn't have an in-game map as well.

Somehow it's very fun to draw your own maps.

[fingersmith]

I used to draw my own maps too. That was unforgettably good fun.

The menu thing probably depends a lot on the style of the game and how it fits in with the overall feel. I don't think it's unhelpful to provide the verbs and items in the immediate area or player inventory.

Although it wouldn't fit in with the sort of game I envisage because I want the reader to pick out the important things from the room themselves. I want virtually everything described in the texts to be interactive, a large portion of the game world would be built from the ground up from interactive objects but not everything the player can interact with will be important.

So in a finite world a menu probably works well. In the graphical game world hovering with the mouse highlights an item, picking up an item and moving it over another changes the mouse cursor appropriately and talking to NPCs yields menu driven responses, providing a similar level of feedback to your text menu system.

I think it changes the emphasis of the game onto 'questing' rather than what I might be inclined to call 'adventuring'.

[UscGradEray]

You have some interesting ideas. I'd like to see what you produce. Of course, I'm just a lowly slime, so what do I know?

I'm afraid I don't agree with you about the small verb list. If you don't provide multiple verbs to do the same thing (push button, press button, hit button...), you'll need to have the player memorize every verb that can be used. I don't think that's a reasonable expectation from text adventure players.

Of course, if you really limit the verbs, the player can easily memorize them. By "really limit", I mean limit to something like these four forms: "use object", "use direct_object on indirect_object", "give indirect_object direct_object" (or "give direct_object to indirect_object"), and "talk to npc". The drawback to this method is that it's difficult to use the same object in multiple ways. Using objects in unexpected ways is often a large part of the puzzle/quest nature of text adventures, so you would need a way around this difficulty.
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[fingersmith]