by Tdarcos » Tue Sep 06, 2022 6:48 pm
Bimbam Wakawaka wrote: Tue Sep 06, 2022 3:25 pm
So if I wanted to write tge Great Anercan novel in IF form, which is the best app to make it?
Simple answer: Whichever one will permit you to tell the story the way you want to. But that's just the beginning, the means to write the game is probably the least importan part of developing the game. I'll explain in more detail.
Before IF languages came out, you had to know a general purpose programming language (Crowther and Woods
Colossal Caves Adventure as well as Bob Supnic's
Dungeo[n]* were written using FORTRAN IV (FORTRAN 66). Others have been done in Basic, C, Pascal, PHP, and probably many others.
Today we have a number of Domain Specific Languages designed specifically to aid in creating Interactive Fiction. These include Adventure Game Toolkit (AGT), Hugo, TADS, Twine, and ZIL, among many others. Each has strengths and weaknesses. It might be a good idea, before spending dozens of hours to learn an Interactive Fiction Writing System, that you see if it does what you want to do, because once you've invested weeks of time on a project, learning the language and designing the game, then discovering that you picked the wrong language to implement it, then you either have to modify (shoehorn) the intended game to fit the constraints of the language, drop the parts of the game you either won't shoehorn, or can't get to work, or throw out all the work and start over.
You also have to decide what audience you are targeting: do you want something to run as a desktop application (either interpreted through an Interactive Fiction System or written in a compiled language like Basic, C, C++, or Pascal, etc.), run on the web as a browser game (some IF systems allow you to do both, or you can use a web-based language like Javascript, Python or PHP), or do you also want it to run as a mobile application?
Also, what features do you want to use? Are you willing to "settle" for text only with typed-in commands, to add pictures, sound, video, or even "point and click" with a mouse? You need to decide what are the features you must have to tell the story, those which are important but either you could live without, and those that are nice to have but if they're dropped it won't affect the story. Then determine which one(s) support the most important parts.
Also, consider what type of story it is. Is it simply a "scavenger hunt" where the player just has to find things? Are there puzzles that have to be solved? Are there Non-Player Characters (NPCs) that have to be interacted with, questioned, fought, or killed? Then consider the motivation of the player: why would they want to play your game? What genre is it in (historical, gothic, western, crime story, mystery, puzzle, science fiction, fantasy, or some combination of two or more of these? How are you going to write the story first person, (where the game expresses everything in terms of itself, e.g. "I see a mailbox","I met Joe") third person (where it refers to everything indirectly. "There is a mailbox here," "Joe walked in to the room") or the most common (for Interactive Fiction, and rare for books) second person ("You see a mailbox here," "Joe walks up to you") or some combination?
Also, what is the setting? Where does it happen? How many rooms are there? What is the player's motivation? What is the end goal? Writing an Interactive fiction program could take weeks or even months, are you willing to sink the time into it?
There is more involved in the decision than just, "What is the best app to use?"
---
* Technically
Dungeon (which is a clone of the computer game Zork I) was called
Dungeo because the PDP-11 minicomputer only supported six-character file names.
[quote="Bimbam Wakawaka" post_id=131021 time=1662503142]
So if I wanted to write tge Great Anercan novel in IF form, which is the best app to make it?
[/quote]
Simple answer: Whichever one will permit you to tell the story the way you want to. But that's just the beginning, the means to write the game is probably the least importan part of developing the game. I'll explain in more detail.
Before IF languages came out, you had to know a general purpose programming language (Crowther and Woods [i]Colossal Caves Adventure[/i] as well as Bob Supnic's [i]Dungeo[n][/i]* were written using FORTRAN IV (FORTRAN 66). Others have been done in Basic, C, Pascal, PHP, and probably many others.
Today we have a number of Domain Specific Languages designed specifically to aid in creating Interactive Fiction. These include Adventure Game Toolkit (AGT), Hugo, TADS, Twine, and ZIL, among many others. Each has strengths and weaknesses. It might be a good idea, before spending dozens of hours to learn an Interactive Fiction Writing System, that you see if it does what you want to do, because once you've invested weeks of time on a project, learning the language and designing the game, then discovering that you picked the wrong language to implement it, then you either have to modify (shoehorn) the intended game to fit the constraints of the language, drop the parts of the game you either won't shoehorn, or can't get to work, or throw out all the work and start over.
You also have to decide what audience you are targeting: do you want something to run as a desktop application (either interpreted through an Interactive Fiction System or written in a compiled language like Basic, C, C++, or Pascal, etc.), run on the web as a browser game (some IF systems allow you to do both, or you can use a web-based language like Javascript, Python or PHP), or do you also want it to run as a mobile application?
Also, what features do you want to use? Are you willing to "settle" for text only with typed-in commands, to add pictures, sound, video, or even "point and click" with a mouse? You need to decide what are the features you must have to tell the story, those which are important but either you could live without, and those that are nice to have but if they're dropped it won't affect the story. Then determine which one(s) support the most important parts.
Also, consider what type of story it is. Is it simply a "scavenger hunt" where the player just has to find things? Are there puzzles that have to be solved? Are there Non-Player Characters (NPCs) that have to be interacted with, questioned, fought, or killed? Then consider the motivation of the player: why would they want to play your game? What genre is it in (historical, gothic, western, crime story, mystery, puzzle, science fiction, fantasy, or some combination of two or more of these? How are you going to write the story first person, (where the game expresses everything in terms of itself, e.g. "I see a mailbox","I met Joe") third person (where it refers to everything indirectly. "There is a mailbox here," "Joe walked in to the room") or the most common (for Interactive Fiction, and rare for books) second person ("You see a mailbox here," "Joe walks up to you") or some combination?
Also, what is the setting? Where does it happen? How many rooms are there? What is the player's motivation? What is the end goal? Writing an Interactive fiction program could take weeks or even months, are you willing to sink the time into it?
There is more involved in the decision than just, "What is the best app to use?"
---
* Technically [i]Dungeon[/i] (which is a clone of the computer game Zork I) was called [i]Dungeo[/i] because the PDP-11 minicomputer only supported six-character file names.