Text Adventures – 10 Awesome Creative Writing Tools

I remember back in the early 80’s spending hours and hours sitting in front of a monochromatic computer screen playing text adventure games like the Zork series or The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Graphics capabilities were still very primitive compared to the imaginations of the writers, so these adventure games relied on the “theatre of the mind” instead of the capabilities of your graphics card.

Myself and Joe sitting around his Classic Mac.

When I was 12, my best friend Joe Kauffman and I started to write simple text adventures on his Macintosh for fun. Without an engine to start with, every option was hand-coded in Basic and we quickly burned through our 128k of RAM. Good times.

Fast-forward to 2018. Modern adventure games are in HD resolution with incredibly realistic animated characters, dazzling special effects, and complicated interwoven plots that take hours to complete, and dozens more to explore thoroughly. They are immersive and so much fun to play, but also costs millions of dollars to create with teams of hundreds of people.

Since our modest days in 1984, Joe now runs his own game studio called Fire Maple Games and has created popular mobile adventure games such as “The Secret of Grisly Manor”. I now work as a game director at Deck Nine Games and work on adventure games as well, including Life is Strange: Before the Storm. We both absolutely love the challenge of creating modern adventure games with our current technology, but it got me thinking.

What if I wanted to get back to my roots? What if I just wanted to write a simple adventure game and publish it myself. What tools have advanced since 1984?

There are a LOT of free tools now, hooray for technology.  But as I quickly discovered there are two major approaches to creating text adventure games, each with distinct roots.

What is Interactive Fiction?

Interactive Fiction (aka IF) games are essentially “open-world” adventures where you are told a brief description of your location, any objects or people nearby, and then prompted to enter combinations of verbs and objects to take action. You have a library of commands you need to know in order to navigate your world. “Walk North” “Take Dagger” “Talk to Bob” etc. The iconic example of this type of game is “Zork” developed by Infocom.  Later, this technology would evolve into the Lucas Arts style graphic adventure game where instead of having to memorize and type commands, you could simply point and click the actions and objects.

Plot elements in these stories are triggered when you do something, like pick up an object, unlock a door, or talk to a person. Some plot elements are also time sensitive, so if you take too long exploring your open world, you could fail in your quest.

Interactive Fiction usually has puzzles that need to be solved to unlock new objects or quests. This can lead to frustration with players who can’t figure out what to do next. Sometimes solutions involve a very bizarre combination of objects or action that was probably the result of an inside joke by the game designer.

The “Flow” of IF

If you were to capture the text stream while you played, and printed it onto the pages of a book, it would read like the most stiff and mechanical novel you’ve ever written.  Not exactly a page-turner.  For this reason, Interactive Fiction adventures definitely feel more like a “game,” however the player has more agency in each action that is taken and the consequences typically feel more like they are a natural result of your choice of actions.

Facade

A notable experiment in the growth of IF was the project “Facade” which aimed to enhance the way dialog was handled. It tried to allow the player to type anything they wanted, at any time. This would allow for a more “real-world” way we interact with others, and would fit perfectly into the IF framework of freeform text entry. When I tried it, my results were iffy at best. The technology was never adopted into any games, but the concept is fascinating and I hope that someone continues to develop the concept in the future.

Modern IF

The modern evolution of IF is usually infused with some sort of action or combat game mode. Examples would be open-world adventure games like Skyrim, Tomb Raider, or Grand Theft Auto. At the core, these games are still players choosing where to explore, object interactions, puzzle unlocks, and conversations with characters.

What is Choose Your Own Adventure?

“Choose Your Own Adventure” (CYOA for short) started as a series of books popularized in the 80’s and 90’s. In the books, you would read a few pages of engaging story, make a decision about what to do, then turn to a specific page to see what happened next. The simplicity of the multiple-choice decisions allowed for the gamification of stories, using the printed page.  It was groundbreaking and incredibly fun. The branching storyline is directed by your choices along the way. Readers always kept a finger in the previous page because you’d never know when the adventure could end and you wanted to re-think your last decision.

The video games that were modeled after this style of story are sometimes called “Multiple Choice Games” (MCG’s for short) and were equally as simple in design.  They eliminated the necessity to learn commands by offering a simple clickable link interfaces, which made them easier to play compared to their Interactive Fiction counterparts.

An advantage of the computerized versions of CYOA books was the ability to add systems of conditional checking which allowed for more complex story options. Your choices could be tracked and consequences triggered later, or counters could be used to track how many times you did something to give access to interesting variations or special choices.  At its heart, the challenge for writing CYOA is quantity of content creation.  Every branch you have requires you to write additional content, and either end the story, find a way of branching back into the main narrative, or continue to write a unique branch of the story.  Quantity of content can grow exponentially if you’re not careful.

If you were to capture the text of a CYOA adventure game as you played it, then printed that onto pages of a book, you would find that it reads very naturally.  For this reason, people who may not like playing games will typically enjoy this style of game.  It’s much more akin to reading a good novel than playing a game.

Modern CYOA

The modern example of CYOA can be seen in the TellTale adventure games like Games of Thrones and The Walking Dead series. At their core, these games are “on rails”. The story progresses and you simply get to “switch tracks” at predetermined times based on dialog choices and key decisions along the way. This leads to the feeling of having less choice, but the overall narrative experience plays out more like a traditional structured story.

Finding the “Write” Tool For You  (See what I did there?)

After years in our modern adventure game industry, I do miss the simple days of just using the crafted word to tell an interactive story. Now, thanks to modern tools, you can can easily get back to basics. Depending on what style game you want to make, IF or CYOA, there are several choices of tools.  Luckily most of them are free, and in fact, some tools allow you to publish your results and earn revenue from your interactive literary masterpiece.

I scoured the Internet looking for all the tools I could find, and arrived at this list.  While it is not a definitive list, it represents what I found as the most prolific and widely used out there.

I have my own needs I was looking for, but you will have your own.  When evaluating a tool, weigh it against your technical abilities. A tool should help you be creative, not slow you down or get in your way. We all have different creative approaches, so for that reason there is no “one tool to rule them all” here. I aimed to present all the information I found in a way that would help you pick the best tool for your next text adventure project!

Inform 7 – Interactive Fiction

Inform 7 is a very popular Interactive Fiction authoring tool, with thousands of titles created under it’s banner.  The tools run on Windows or Mac, and emphasize writing with a natural language coding over a heavy GUI interface.  While there is a formal language that needs to be learned, it is facilitated by integrated documentation as well as a variety of integrated tools to help you visualize your story, find and solve problems. If you expect to keep your hands on the keyboard for a majority of the creative process, this very well may be your tool of choice.

Specs

TADS – Interactive Fiction

This powerful coding language was developed specifically for Interactive Fiction development, based on other structured languages like Javascript and C++.  While it does have many features, it is not a tool you could quickly jump into if you’re not familiar with structured coding.  If you are more of a storyteller looking for a tool to make it easier for you, this is not it. If you are programmer looking for a way to code your story, this might be the right starting place for you.

Specs

ADRIFT – Interactive Fiction

ADRIFT, short for “Adventure Development & Runner – Interactive Fiction Toolkit”, and I’m thankful for the acronym.  It’s a Windows-only development tool that makes easy work of setting up your story through the use of menus and windows within the interface.  You can get up and running quickly without the need to write code.  It is well documented, and there is a good-sized community that uses it if you ever need to reach out for help.

Specs

Quest – Interactive Fiction

Quest is a very well designed, and fully-featured tool for writing and publishing Interactive Fiction games.  The tool is designed with an extensive GUI that allows for point-and-click configuration of your entire story without the need to learn code.  However, that time saved from learning code will be needed to learn all of the GUI features to implement your game.  So, it really depends if you are better with learning semantics of a new language, or better with visual learning.

Specs

Twine – CYOA

Twine is a multi-platform editing tool for creating complex choose your own adventure style text adventure games.  You can create an adventure quickly with minimal training now, and make them more robust and interesting with variables, images and sounds later when you are ready.  Stories publish directly to HTML, so your published stories can be viewed by practically anyone on any platform or device.

Specs

InkleWriter – CYOA

InkleWriter is the writing tool created by Inkle Studios to create award-winning games such as 80 Days and Sorcery!  It’s an online tool for writing choose your own adventure style stories that uses a blend of simple text editing along with a lightweight GUI for organizing and linking your story snippets.  You can get started right away with minimal training.

Specs

Choice of Games – CYOA

Choice of Games is a website that hosts their own proprietary COYA script format called “Choice Script.”  This language is a very simple yet thorough scripting language for creating CYOA adventures.  The software can be downloaded and used for free, but you cannot publish an commercial works directly using the software.  However, Choice of Games does hire writers to publish games via their website.  So if you’re willing to use Choice Script, you may be able to actually make some money as a writer.  This is unique to all of the other tools and services that I was able to find.

Specs

Squiffy – CYOA

Squiffy is a solid CYOA tool brought to you by the same people that develop Quest software (above).  The editor can be run on Windows, Mac or Linux, which means you can edit your game offline on your native platform.  However there is an online-based browser version available as well.

Specs

Other Notable Tools

All of the above tools are free, which is always great.  Although I wasn’t planning to do reviews of commercially available tools, there were a few that I thought were worth mentioning.  They are completely overkill for simple text adventures.  Their output will not be a playable text adventure, but instead a data file that must be exported and integrated into an engine and made part of a game.  These are very well developed modern narrative design tools designed as part of a larger more fleshed out pipeline, which you should look into if you wanted to take your IF or CYOA adventure to the next level.  Their features are very well documented on their respective websites below.

The Next Step for Text Adventures

Each of these tools has their own unique spin to this age-old genre, and they each do it well. So what’s missing? I haven’t seen any tools that support true cross-breeding. I’d love to see a tool that allowed you to start with CYOA, then switch to a more free-form text adventure for specific moments, then switch back again. This is very similar to the modern equivalents where you’d be able to have a simple choice-base conversation with another character, but then explore the area to solve a puzzle.  It would be great if the text adventure tools could support this.  Perhaps it’s time for me to break out some C++.

For now, we have a solid set of tools that would let any semi-technically-able creative writer to put together a story and get it published. Go ahead. You have the tools. Get started, and good luck!

About the Author

Webb Pickersgill is a game director at Deck Nine Games in Westminster, Colorado, developers of the industry-acclaimed narrative adventure game “Life is Strange: Before the Storm.”  When he’s not busy directing actors in the mocap room, he’s usually geeking out with technology, playing the electric bass, or kicking back with his family… or, apparently, writing articles about text adventures.