The Adventuron One
It's late here, and this is the first (late) post in this new blog, which will deal (exclusively) in posts relating to the Adventuron system.
The Adventuron One
Adventuron has been around for a while now and so far, I have only one regular user of Adventuron. But what a user ! No less than John Wilson, of Zenobi fame.
John (@RochBalrog) has been busy tolerating my updates, and porting his QUILLed games to the new engine. John is an absolute gentleman and I'm very happy to have lightly nudged him out of retirement in order to play with my toy, even just a little bit.
John's Adventuron Ports
Inactivity
So far, sadly, there have been no real new games released for Adventuron since new years eve 2017, when I wrote this article on Medium.I feel there are a number of factors that explains this.
There are an astonishingly small number of people still playing "text adventure" games out there in the world, and even fewer developers of new "text adventure" games (hereon referred to as TA games).
Those that want to develop these types of games seem to be motivated by the technical challenge of putting it together, or motivated by the fun constraints of a true 'retro' platform. They are far more likely to use THE QUILL or PAW than to use Adventuron. Which is valid. Adventuron is a faux-retro platform.
For example, this is running on Adventuron inside a browser:
Motivation In A World Without Users
I am motivated to build something that will be a means of creating more retro-styled and anachronistic text adventures in the wild. I wanted to provide tools to make this possible, but I also wanted to bring back the aesthetic of SCOTT ADAMS games, THE QUILL and PAW and (to a lesser extent) GAC.
Systems like Inform 7 and other adventure game toolkits are way way more advanced with their parsers / game engines, but they seem to be less concerned with how the game feels when you interact with it. In my view it's all about the typography, the screen layout, and the bitmap / vector graphics - as well as the parser delay.
Adventuron encourages authors to create games with the soul of bitmap fonts and low resolution abstract graphics, whilst being tied to neither of those aesthetics.
I'm also motivated by innovations in UI. Adventuron ultimately should be able to be used without a keyboard. Not yet mind you, but the plan is there, as are good touch controls. By building games around an evolving engine, new features can be added to older games without changing a single line of code. Click to navigate is the first of these features.
Adventuron is a side-project, and a useful proof of concept for my language development and editor creation technology, but if I can inspire others to create something that would not exist if not for good tools, then that's a happy side effect of a necessary demo.
I feel my motivation for continuing to work on Adventuron over the years will remain. If I build it, they will build on it. Just not yet.
0 comments:
Post a Comment