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Interface for a text-based game

Story taken from The Forbidden City by Ian Page and Joe Dever

I’m a sucker for interactive stories. Similar to CYOA books, they're based around a single user interaction: choose one of the choices to advance the plot. As such, everything surrounding this interaction should be quick and snappy: changing settings, referencing backstories, checking how your character is doing - like flipping pages in a book, all options should be readily available.

Yet, most text-based games suffer from long animations, menus in menus and too many buttons to check one thing. In this simple design, I kept the story front and center, while menus slide in from the sides whenever necessary. 

A hoverstate of one of the choice buttons

Modern like a video game

Most tools used to create choice-based games like ChoiceScript and Twine limit your gameplay options, and for a reason: choice-based games are interactive stories, nothing more. But as I worked to reimagine the interface, I began thinking about how buttons don’t necessarily have to be just that - buttons. What if I stray from the CYOA framework and make a new game altogether?

Combat in a text-based game

I experimented with converting text-based combat into a solitaire-like gameplay element, where you chain together keywords to create your own choice. String together ‘Aim’ and ‘Fire’ to create a specific attack. 

While I ended up coding my own tokenizer, parser and lexer for ChoiceScript in order to facilitate this new gameplay, I never fully realized it. Still, I think about it from time to time, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up working with text-based games in some other way in the future.

Visual editor for CYOA games

I also tried to come up with an IDE (visual editor) for ChoiceScript. Story and script courtesy of Choice of Games LLC.

Dit is een persoonlijk project en was niet in opdracht van of overzien door de namen die in de tekst zijn vermeld.

Dit is een concept en is (nog) niet volledig gerealiseerd. Ik post het omdat ik het geheel interessant genoeg vind om te delen.