A typical text adventure revolves around a pretty simple model:
A. Display description (data base).
B. Get and execute commands (parser).
Repeat A and B until done.
One thing I learned way back on the PDP 11/70 was text adventures really rely on the parser to make an enjoyable game and the parser is not a trivial piece of programming. You have to break a command line down from something like English (in my case) to something the computer understands.
In all these years, I’ve never wanted to delve into creating a parser, so I’ve looked at systems that were written by others for creating text adventures.
Eamon, on the Apple II and recently on the PC, is such a system. I’ve looked at it off and on over the years, but it wasn’t what I wanted to write for.
TADS 2 is another system available on Macs and PC’s. I really liked how that system works. In January, I started writing a text adventure using TADS 2, on my Mac SE and ran into some technical difficulties. TADS 2 on the Mac SE, didn’t give very specific errors or locations making it really difficult to debug.
The other big system for text adventures is Inform. Inform runs on Mac’s and PC’s and supposedly on the Apple II. I tried translating what little I had written from TADS 2 to Inform 6, but could not get it to compile on the Mac.
The nice feature of both TADS 2 and Inform 6, is once you have written your adventure and compiled it into a game file, the game file just needs to be moved to a computer with an interpreter to run it. Both systems have a large base of interpreters to work with including vintage Macs, current Macs, and PC’s running DOS, Windows or Linux.
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