Text Adventure
Concept
A generative text adventure game that utilize font, movement, size and color to convey scenes. The feel should be very noir but with a Twilight Zone feel. The rough concept comes from The Lost Room.
Mechanics
The game will have a database of 'items' that it can choose from to bring into play. Some items will modify aspects of the game, some are just decoys. I want to avoid the old style endless searching for combinations of keywords and want it to be a little more of a choose your own adventure. The things you can do at any point should be obvious and the degree to which their outcome is ambiguous, should be clear.
Structural Relationships
We can build the world through relationships and attributes. Relationships are 'can have' and 'must have'. Attributes can be temporal(?). So a coat has attributes of color, length, value and could have objects like buttons, zipper, collar. Each of these would then have their own set of attributes and (possibly, though probably not in this case) objects. This builds out a tree that can be converted into a description.
Story Components
- Themes
- Timeline
- Entities (conscious beings)
- Relationships (with entities, locations and objects)
- Emotion
- Importance
- Classifications
- Brother
- Spouse
- Parent
- Friend
- Enemy
- Emotional state
- Motivations
- Faults/Strengths
- Knowledge (set of facts)
- Behavior Patterns
- Speech patterns
- Ticks
- Habits
- Initial States
- State Changes over time
- Relationships (with entities, locations and objects)
- Places
- Expanse
- Neutral Perception
- Location
- Objects
- Ideas
- Religion
- Technology
- Politics
- Facts
- Events
- Data
- Causation
- Conflict
- Cause
- Type
- Entities
- Resolution
- Action
- Actor
- Goal
- Motivation
- Outcomes
Techniques
- Twists
- Forshadowing
- "Two Steps Removed" A thinks B thinks X is true of C
- Suspense
- Metaphore
- Greek
- Tragic Flaw
- Golden Mean
Objective
The game will generate a few cases (you're a detective) that are immediately available to you. The start is always the same - one open file on your desk, a woman comes into the office with a case, there's a man on hold, a newspaper story...
Each of these cases will have an Item, all but one are decoys. The real Item will lead on a sprawling case. The other cases will somehow benefit you, but they are not the point of the game.
Look and Feel
The screen will be divided into a number of sections that represent things that are happening.
- Inventory
- Speakers
- Narrator
- Effects
Resources
- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/353274/story-telling-building-algorithms
- http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~mueller/storyund/storyres.html
- http://www.eee.bham.ac.uk/sharplem/Papers/mexica_jetai.pdf
- ftp://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/tech-report/1992-reports/920057.pdf (this one is LONG - I'm at pg.68)
- http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~brooks/dissertation.html
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_generation
- http://www.nltk.org/
- https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iBGIYxMs6ITggcJ4C2itx75zxO4jyUcw55G4pDnxl8c/edit