Building Text Games with Flounder


This space is intended for creators who are interested in creating text-based adventure games. The process is not especially complicated, but there have been a few roadblocks that I've been working through. I'm hoping to offer some shortcuts and creative notes that I've been thinking through.


ASCII art can really bring these projects to life. Text-based adventures require rich text that can help detail the world, but a visual cue makes things far more immersive. But I was really struggling with this at first, as all of my images looked like this:


/\

/ \

\ __ / \ __ /

\ / \ _ / <()> \ _ / \ /

\_/ \_/ \_/________\_/ \_/ \_/

_____________/__I___I___\_____________

/_I___I___I__\

/I___I___I___I_\

/___I___I___I___I\

/__I___I___I___I___\

/_I___I___I___I___I__\

/I___I___I___I___I___I_\

/___I___I___I___I___I___I\

/__I___I___I___I___I___I___\

/_I___I___I___I___I___I___I__\


Luckily, there's a cheat code for this - the ``` keys. By pasting three backticks above and below an image, it creates a field that doesn't auto-format. By doing so, the once-broken image now appears like this:


                   /\
                  /  \                  
\     __         /    \         __     /
 \   /  \   _   / <()> \   _   /  \   /
  \_/    \_/ \_/________\_/ \_/    \_/
 _____________/__I___I___\_____________
             /_I___I___I__\
            /I___I___I___I_\
           /___I___I___I___I\
          /__I___I___I___I___\
         /_I___I___I___I___I__\
        /I___I___I___I___I___I_\
       /___I___I___I___I___I___I\
      /__I___I___I___I___I___I___\
     /_I___I___I___I___I___I___I__\

For poets interested in posting their work using unconventional spacing, this is especially important, as you can tab over as many times as you'd like without having formatting issues.


One major consideration that I've been working through is building puzzles. These may require many moving parts to build in terms of separate pages, but add a sense of reward in moving past it. One area of my game I want to be locked off until the end, and my current thinking is that players will collect three words that they need to enter into the URL to access. So it would be something like you find a burrito in one world, cheese in another, and coffee in a third - the player would then add in burritocheesecoffee.gmi to the end of the URL chain and that would unlock the final area. Another concept I'm toying with is having a specific string of dialogue options that allows the player to progress. So for instance, there are three questions, and three options for each question. I would create one page for the first three questions, leading to three separate pages for the next set of three questions, and nine pages for the final set of three questions. It might look like this


ABC

ABC1-ABC2-ABC3

ABC1a-ABC2a-ABC3a ABC1b-ABC2b-ABC3b ABC1c-ABC2c-ABC3c


Of the final nine divergent paths, only one of them leads forwards. But this also creates some tedium - in total, you're going to have to create 13 different pages. I don't see any other way around this, but keeping options limited might be the best solution.


My other thought is for a roulette style puzzle, in which the player has to pick from a wall of 50 different numbers and only one of them leads forward.


Copy-paste is really your friend here.



pickyourownadventure.flounder.online/