intfiction.org

Common question that I never knew an answer to.

For me, I'm writing my own engine in Visual Basic .NET. It's not a great language, but it works well enough. 20 lines and you can start writing out the whole game. 25 and you can already do your first input and output.

I'm not sure there's a language that someone hasn't used to write text adventures.

There just was a really interesting post on Planet IF about Zork, comparing games written in MDL and Fortran.

Why am I not doubting this?

According to detractors of Inform 7, English is just such a language.

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Man ska inte tro allt man tänker.

Great. Now you've done it. Someone is going to start going through the archives, and eventually find a language that hasn't been used to write text adventures, and write a text adventure in it. Just watch - the next speed IF will have a "Sorry about the quality but that's all I could manage in whitespace [or OISC]"

Probably not Malbolge though.

I believe that people who try to write their own authoring system in order to write their own text adventure, aren't actually interested in writing their own text adventure. What they really want is write an IF system. They just don't realize that.

Let's take that a step further up. Suppose you want to write your own authoring system. But you don't do it in C, Basic, Java, whatever. You write your own general purpose programming language, in which you then attempt to write your own IF authoring system. I don't believe your goal was to write your own IF system. You wanted to write your own GP language to begin with.

Why don't we write in 6502 or so-- oh, wait. We've done IFs before on the Atari 2600. Never mind.

Actually, the engine work is very fast and simple for a text adventure game on VB, since you just have to make a loop and make it not crash by requiring key input.

Let me guess, it doesn't run on Linux or Mac OS X, right?

Too late -- Adam Thornton already did some large proportion of Mentula Macanus in Whitespace for TWIFComp. (Where the source code had to be 140 characters or less, not counting white space.)

This makes sense to me. What I suspect happens is that someone is learning Programming Language X and is looking for a project with which to polish their X skills. At that point, writing a text adventure becomes a very attractive option. Easy I/O, and no messy graphics to contend with.

[Edit:] This wouldn't apply to Javascript, of course. The reason to write a game in Javascript could be that you DO want access to graphics and sound in a cross-platform delivery system.