there is still a market for text based game, but it's very competitive, if you seek for the net you will find, mostly with the key word IF (interactive fiction), there is a lot of talented artist

but i'am a graphic designer, there one thing i didn't see with text game >>> play with the typo
mean, there is not also the graphic which improve, but the presentation of text too, play with the typo, the scale, the color, the italic, the composition on screen, even with the space! there is a lot to do with only text!! see around you et look at advertising, they play a lot with the text , the typo etc... you can try dinamic text , think about intro of move as example, imagine than the texte is free in a 2D plan, some in miror, some shaking, some falling, some at 90° or 45°

you can do it and it's cheaper than game (think you can use smiley too, find a style that fit)

i was use to do thing like that when i was a graphic calculator programmer

use all the field of ASCII art

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
be good
be evil
but do it WELL
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

[edited by - Neoshaman on November 2, 2003 8:56:14 PM]

Go ahead and make a text game. They''re awesome. But be warned: Without pretty graphics, crappy design is easy to spot. There are more than a few games selling today for $30-$60 that would be absolutely valueless without their bump maps and cut-scenes. I suspect your game will tell you more about your ability to design a video game than your ability to write code, but you''ll learn a lot about both.

go ahead make it. nothing more valuable than experience. not to mention if people actually download it and play it then your name gets around. and in the end its allways something to keep in your portfolio.

From a commercial point of view (selling) it is a bad idea but from a development experience point of view it is a great idea as you can focus on the structure of the game and not worry about art assets.

The biggest problem with text games is that most people are pretty bad at typing. This causes user frustration as their mistakes often stop them solving puzzles. Then the other day I had an idea. Why not include an inline spell check as included in Word. If the user mistypes the game underlines the text so that they know and can correct it before hitting enter and getting some annoying error message "I see no teh here.

Dan Marchant
Obscure Productions
Game Development & Design consultant

Just make the game fun. If your game is more fun than playing a pretty graphics game I would rather spend my time with yours. Has happened lots of times.

And about the morrowind thing, be careful, you will have to make a really complex design so errors are easy. I got tired of it because some stupid things in the design that took the fun out of it.

But if you manage to make it really open ended and with few errors and even better the lack of stupid annoying things, I would REALLY like to play it.

quote: Original post by TheDarkening
I''ve never played a text based game, but I dont even read books unless they have words like "programming" or "game design" in them. I''m sure there are other people out there that would play a good text game. In fact I''m sure there are people out there that are saying "Damn, I wish a good text based game would come out! All the games today focus too much of fansy graphics and not enough on story line." However, I dont think there are many of that type of person here at GameDev.

You''ll get support from me at least. ;-) I don''t mind gfx/sfx, but I still prefer games from the early 90''s before the 3D craze really took off.

Text games can be incredibly rich, but be prepared to put a lot of time into the world. I worked on a new world for a MUD once upon a time. I''m not a verbally creative sort of person, and after several dozen rooms I started dreading writing the descriptions.
But that might not be a problem for you (especially if your text game is going to have a roguelike interface...).

May I please point all interested parties two the two glaring examples of why text games /are/ reasonable:
ADoM
NetHack

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Anyone saying that text games are dead haven''t seen the massive MUD community. Some MUDs are really well-designed and fun to play, not to mention that MUDs was way ahead of graphical games when it came to MMORPGs.

And as several already said, designing a robust text-game got quite some similarities with graphic games and will give you good experience in programming. The hardest part would be designing it since the design would be the only thing that makes a text game attractive.

I would personally value a well designed text game/MUD more than Yet-Another-First-Person-Shooter.

-Luctus
Statisticly seen, most things happens to other people.
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Heh. I love ADoM but when my bro(and almost everyone else) look at it they just tell the wouldn''t bother playing a game where you are a letter

Also worth trying if you want the multiplayer quickly:

http://www.byond.com/

It''s an IDE with a built-in language for a variety of text or 2d online games. I think the graphics-oriented ones get more attention, but they''re pretty limited too. Lots of DBZ fangames >.< Never really focused on learning the language enough to actually do anything significant though.

Their model is in some ways similar to what Garage Games is doing, only there''s no entry cost to get their tools. But once you have a game live, it gets a spot on their site. You get players, they get a (hopefully) quality game. I don''t know how it holds up financially, but they''ve been around quite a while now.