you know i was writing out how you could make an object oriented structure to the text rpg code. something poorly represented in released products cause of their age / sophistication. but besides that i got to thinking bout text based rpg. one thing i concluded with was that game itself can always plausibly be more complicated at the text level. the interaction more verbose. i wonder if there isnt room for a 2d rpg where text based interaction was still a key. for example moving next to the chest you could inspect it. getting a verbose answer much easierly customizable by a content writer then having a new graphic for 500 chest in the level. in fact if you look at rpgs like bg most of the container content gets reused. traps come off flat and procedural. with things like zorks hints to the traps design construct and defusion were in the description making the player the player. under a pure graphics approach you would have to have a 500 man art team to pull that off. under a graphical/text approach it would be akin to having traditional graphical emmersion with a DM voice in response to interactions. the scene could reuse artwork as BG does and all rpgs do. but the content writers could then customize each chests description without need for new art. i mean for the reading challenged voice output engines arnt bad nowadays. they output text in a file so its readily changable by a content designers. also note then can we still find room to interact textual. output textual seems automatic this is a great plus to a 2d game. but what about interact via text. beyond inspect. true traditional "against" arguments apply. but fundamentally what im saying is that 2d art based games and text games arnt mutually exclusive: the best features from each could potentially be combined into one wonderful engine with some tuning.

Hmm. I seem to remember that there was a group of games that were adventure text/2d hybrid - Hugo''s Haunted House, was IIRC one of them.

You''d have to be careful of two things:
* Make sure that whatever you draw is referenceable by text. The player comes up with some crackpot idea relating to an object they can see, but that object was just thrown in by the artist and it isn''t ''registered'' with the engine.
* Giving the player a picture of a scene provides them with something more than a text-based description - it provides them with a picture of the layout of objects relative to each other. That one could mess up puzzles a little.

If you''ve got a Mac, you might want to look for a game called ''World Builder,'' I think it has many of the ideas you''ve described. Only downfalls is that it''s on Mac (so, tiny audience) and it''s all in black and white.

Superpig
- saving pigs from untimely fates
- sleeps in a ham-mock at www.thebinaryrefinery.cjb.net

Heh, I remember the Hugo games, those were fun... altho I think of them more as adventure Kings Quest/LSL style more than RPG.