On the right path?

[Xell]

Greetings!


Nobody would ever confuse me for the world's greatest writer.  In my time I have published a short-story or two, but that's about it.  Perusing these forums I've stumbled across many a tale from individuals desiring to create their own stories in the form of a text-based game.  I appear to have caught the same bug and, due to my rather stubborn nature, now find myself in much the same predicament.


Research suggests that flash is inadvisable for such an endeavor.  That it is a dying media and perhaps an html5/javascript combination would be better suited for anyone looking to break into the world of text based creations.  Now I understand there are better tools suited for complete beginners such as myself, and am not looking to make light of the difficulty involved with learning this media.  I'm simply stubborn and know from past experience that I am also a bit of a control freak.  Other tools such as Twine would likely leave me frustrated over the lack of control.


My question to you bastions of text-based game knowledge is simple.  Is html5/javascript the way to go nowadays?

 

[Klaptrap]

I've heard that Twine is simpler and easier, but I don't have anything to back that up. I suppose it depends on how game-heavy you want your game to be.

 

[dndw]

Twine would definitely be best if you have little or no programming experience. Even if you do, Twine probably has enough to suit your needs, or at least to function as a prototyping tool. If you do want more control, you're going to have to do some more programming. For browser-based games, an HTML5/JavaScript framework would indeed be the way to go. CreateJS is a free open-source framework, but it will take some doing to get it working for you. Construct2 is game-oriented and purports to not require you to write your own code. The downside is that it's a commercial product, and the free version is somewhat limited.


If browser-based is not a requirement and you have some artistic skill, you might want to check out Ren'Py. It's a visual novel engine in Python, which is pretty easy to learn if you don't know it. That is straying further away from the CoC/TiTS style, though. There are also a number of text adventure engines like ADRIFT or Inform7. The catch with these is that they have text-based input, so you type your actions instead of clicking on them.


For total freedom, you'll have to write your own engine. Clearly, this is not an easy undertaking and if you just want to write your game, I'd advise against it.

 

[FluidFlux]

Unity is also an option, though it requires you to know JavaScript or C# at the very least.

 

[Helix]

Unity is also an option, though it requires you to know JavaScript or C# at the very least.

I can only really recommend Unity for text games if you need the flexibility of real programming languages. I'm using it myself, and even though it's comfortable to work in compared to most other 3D game engines, it does have its problems. Bear in mind that it is not made with text games in mind, and the Unity UI stuff is pretty new.

 

[FluidFlux]

I can only really recommend Unity for text games if you need the flexibility of real programming languages. I'm using it myself, and even though it's comfortable to work in compared to most other 3D game engines, it does have its problems. Bear in mind that it is not made with text games in mind, and the Unity UI stuff is pretty new.

Agreed, I learned mostly in C# so I thought to give it a try for the game I am making, but I have run into several instances where doing something through unity requires massive amounts of extra work. The new UI system lacks several controls natively that I use a lot, such as the ListBox, Tab panel etc. But... Your writing in a strongly typed language with a good debugger to help you out.

 

[Jash]

I'm using Twine 2 at the moment for my first gamelet. I don't have even the slightest interest in learning about coding, I just want to write and Twine makes that extremely easy, while also having more tools on hand for when I actually DO want to go deeper.


If you're wanting to make a visual novel, there's also TyranoBuilder Visual Novel Studio. I tinkered with it a bit and thought it was a neat tool, but I don't have any artistic skills so I put it back on the shelf for later. You can find it on Steam easily enough and, while it's not free, it's pretty cheap. I've never used Ren'Py so I can't comment on how it compares.

 

[Void Director]

As someone who has built an HTML5/JavaScript based text game engine (see here) it's quite a lot of work. I am afraid most of the traditional JavaScript game engines won't help you much as they are aimed at providing utilities for things like sprites and animations not for working with text and are generally worst at it then plain html (as they use canvas instead). Technically you can build such an engine with nothing but native JavaScript and the DOM API. However, the DOM API sucks so you will probably want at least JQuery. Even JQuery is annoying to use in such a large app so an MVC framework like React or Angular is worth looking up (I use Angular, but React is smaller and easier to learn).


Another option is to take look at Adder's open source game engine for Fall of Eden. That will give you an estimate of how much work is involved and perhaps some tips on how you might structure your game engine. Depending on how Adder is licensing it you might even just be able to fork the engine and use it as the basis of your game.


Anyhow, good luck.

 

[Sadtaco]

Like others said, Twine is a good place to start. But I don't like Twine games as they tend to not have hotkeys and such, and it doesn't have a proper API to add that yourself so you have to pull apart the framework to make your own custom build to fix that.


Quest is another, newer, web based text game maker which I think is quiet good, that I rarely see mentioned.


I've always considered making alphas for my engine/tools that I use for LEWD available for others to make games, but it's too much of an investment from me to do so unless someone has prior game experience, and you need to know Javascript to change client appearance stuff(but there are good features of the API for that).
Mine has the flexibility of using a real programming language (Javascript), but it also has all sorts of abstraction layers that do most things for you without needing to know it if you don't want to fully customize and change things. Quest is your better bet if you don't have a team of people and experience, though.