What are text Adventure Games?
Text-based games (also known as interactive fiction) are growing in popularity alongside retro games in general. They’re perfect for anyone who prefers to imagine a game’s events rather than seeing the action play out on screen.
Text-based games are comparatively simple to make, and don’t require hours creating graphics and sound. Interested? Then try these tools to start creating your own text adventure games…
1. Twine
You don’t need any coding experience for simple, basic stories, which is where Twine comes in. Giving you the tools you need to start creating your interactive fiction, Twine runs on desktop and in your browser.
Simply use the app to create your interactive stories and export them as web pages. When your story is finished, upload the HTML files to a web server and share them with the world.
For more complex narratives, Twine supports features like variables and conditional logic. It also supports JavaScript, CSS, and images if you want to present your story as more than standard interactive fiction.
2. Quest
While you don’t need programming experience to use these text adventure makers, it can help with Quest. It features a built-in scripting language for handling complex logic and supports the addition of sound, images, and video.
Available for Windows or in your browser, completed Quest games can be exported to the web and played online. Furthermore, there are no commercial restrictions, so you can even sell your Quest games if you want to.
3. ADRIFT
ADRIFT is one of the oldest functioning options for creating your own text-based games. Its unique selling point is pretty clear: absolutely no programming experience needed, even if you want to create non-trivial narratives.
The beauty of ADRIFT is that everything is driven by the GUI. This means drag-and-drop selections, folder navigation, drop-down menus, etc. All characters, events, objects, variables, etc. are click-to-set-up, making ADRIFT one of the easiest systems to use.
The only downside is that ADRIFT games can only be played through the ADRIFT Runner application. The good news is that ADRIFT is cross-platform, so it’s not too much of an inconvenience.
4. Inform
A free app that uses a programming language based on English, Inform features two built-in books to help you learn. These are a tutorial, Writing With Inform, and The Inform Recipe Book. Using the tutorial, you can ease yourself into the software; the recipe books show you how to control objects in your text adventures.
As well as being bundled into the game-making software, these books can be read on the website’s documentation page. Meanwhile, there is a community of creators working with Inform on the Interactive Fiction Community Forum.
5. Squiffy
From the same team as Quest is the simpler Squiffy tool. While Quest is aimed at writers planning to create advanced text adventures or gamebooks, Squiffy focuses on the story.
Free and open-source, Squiffy outputs completed games as HTML and JavaScript so you can upload them to the web. This can be your own site or the textadventures.co.uk community. Or you can use Adobe PhoneGap to turn your game into an app.
