We have come to the part in our project where our main focus is shifting to the story. This is what makes any work of interactive fiction a game – without the story, there is no game. Storytelling in a text-based adventure is largely done through environmental storytelling; there are no visuals (other than ASCII art on occasion), no narrator to guide the player, and few (if any) other characters to interact with. This makes the design of the rooms and the objects within them crucial to the experience; designing such rooms, the basic building block in any text-based adventure game, will be my main focus going forward.
Deciding what types of rooms make sense for the environment is one of the first steps alongside creating a map to aid in development. It is important to remember that users will not have a map in-game, and so the order of the rooms must be logical without being too complicated. I started to lay out the beginnings of a map in the past week for our game:
I added an underground passage coming from the flooded chamber since it seems to me that the flooded chamber would already be partially underground. West of that, there is an armory due to it having easy access to the outdoors via the passage (I imagined in its prime, this castle would use that as a secret passage). To the east of the courtyard, the astronomy room leads to some curious places – I thought of this as the research wing, and so I added a wizard’s study, a room of doors (a curious room that appears as a void with doors in all directions), and a mushroom forest (a callback to the glowing mushrooms in the courtyard seen earlier).
As for the tower, that is also a callback: when the user first enters the game, they appear in the courtyard where a large tower looms in the distance looking strangely untouched compared to the rest of the castle. What is it doing there? Why is it not partially in ruins like the rest of the castle? Due to this oddity, it seemed like it could be the location of the logical endpoint to the game.
There is much more to come for this game’s story – and I will avoid giving too many more spoilers from now on! In the meantime, I hope this glimpse into our story-building process was interesting and inspires creativity for those who are working on their own stories too.