Lessons from creating my first text adventure

Summary

It’s very easy to accidentally try to create too large a text adventure. My first attempt was way too ambitious, and would have taken months to finish. I still love the idea for that, but it had to go. I picked another idea that was much smaller in scope, but it, too, grew too ambitious. I restarted one more time, from an idea that was even more pared down, and I was actually able to finish that game. With the minimalistic scope it took maybe fifteen hours of active work to create most of the game, and then almost as much time again to fix the 57 problems I received feedback on from beta testers.1 This is a large time investment for me, which makes it unlikely I’ll create another one any time soon, even if I’d really like to. Scope in text adventures is complicated, because there are two dimensions along which scope can vary: breadth and detail. A broad game might have many locations, items, and events, but each is relatively sparsely implemented. Actions get generic responses, and items are mainly generic scenery without interesting interactions. This is the style of some of the earliest text adventures; they had to do it that way due to technical limitations of the time. A detailed game might have few locations, items, and events, but those that do exist are modeled in high detail and interact realistically with each other. Modern development tools afford insane levels of detail, and it’s up to the author to set a reasonable limit to the detail included. Lockout is in the narrow-but-detailed category. Making a broad and detailed game takes a huge effort, so for the hobbyist it boils down to finding the right tradeoff between breadth and detail. For better or worse, the community encourages detailed games, and among modern games, a text adventure that is broad and not detailed stands out as lacking in implementation. A useful comparison to study this difference is The Plot of the Phantom: a newly released game which was designed in the 1980’s, but implemented using...