Hi Harmony here….

Last week we spent completely side tracked from our usual projects and decided to create a Text Adventure game in a week. It was a great idea and everyone feels like they have had a holiday from the daily grind. Just going with a new idea and playing it out in a limited time frame was awesome fun. We did this sort of thing when we were just starting out with the Five Games in Ten Weeks challenge and it really freshens up the creative juices.

The initial idea was to do a text adventure like I used to play when I was a kid on my Trash-80. Zulu loved those games in the days before computer graphics were interesting. So we gave it a limited scope of just using text to tell a story in the manner of a dungeon crawler that incorporated some kind of hand drawn map just like we used to do when playing D&D.

Gene did up a super simple UI and Trixie and Xander worked on getting the programming of the text and mapping underway. The incremental mapping proved to be the biggest challenge and we had to try three different ways of working it till we got it right. Xander will post the code and methodology used in a later entry.

This is how the UI ended up (Kudos to all of you who spotted the callout to “Impossible Mission” another childhood favourite):

In keeping with the theme and the timeframe we used a really simple text call to print the story. This is the opening scene:

Then we worked on the exciting monster battles (all in text):

Finally we implemented the mapping system which tracks your progress through the tomb!

So as you can see it’s pretty simple but really fun to do. I guess this is one of the real strengths of using Unity is that you can quickly mock up a working game in a short amount of time. We will post it into the Play Store as a Beta later this week so you can go for an adventure yourself.

If you are interested in this sort of game I found the following groups a great place to start:

8-Bit Text Adventures
TEXT ADVENTURES & INTERACTIVE FICTION // PLAY / DESIGN / DEVELOPMENT
r/textadventures

Harmony out.