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Inspired by yesterday's lecture by Nika Bertram and Jens Ohlig about text adventure games. I woke up and the first thing I did was play Reconnaissance at Finowfurt which is a text adventure in the tradition of zork. I grew up playing these kinds of games and they hold a special place in my heart.
Reconnaissance at Finowfurt is a game that is set here at Chaos Communication Camp 2007 and it took me about an hour to play. If you're interested, first go download a text adventure game viewer (mac, unix) and then download the game and you're off!
As I was finishing the game, Jens coincidentally showed up and I got to talk to him about text adventures and the future of mashing up text adventure games with ARGs. After expressing an interest in learning how to make a text adventure game, he got me set up with Inform 7 to make a super simple text adventure game adaptation of Charlie the Unicorn. It's a really interesting programing language because it parses and compiles English!
As a beginning programmer, this was easy to navigate with some over the shoulder help. With only a day or two of walking through the example code, you could have a game up and running pretty quick. The trick would become writing an awesome adventure rather than learning code. I found this tutorial for you if you don't have a Jens to walk you through. If you make a geeky text adventure game, make sure to drop a link to it in the comments! - Link
The latest flickr photos from Chaos Communication Camp 2007 are here: - Link
You can also easily create MMO-style text adventures called MUDs and MUSHes and cooperatively or competatively share your text adventures with others.
They usually come with easy-to-use set-up tools and the like. I personally prefer to play around with the PennMUSH server software. Here is the win32 version along with some very helpful FAQs for getting started:
http://mushclient.com/pennmush/
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