Every now and then I feel like making one, as I have a love for them. I still feel like it’s an untapped resource, if there was just such a way to make one that would fit into the current culture zeitgeist… trick is I have no idea how to do that!
Arguably "Disco Elysium" is a modern text adventure.
A text adventure crossed with a point & click puzzle game in a 3D world admittedly but the vast majority of the actual game itself is contained within the text.
It's a text adventure by anything but the most hidebound traditionalist definition. The text is where all of the real action takes place; the graphics are more an illustration of that text than the reality of the game.
and illustrated text adventures have a venerable history; i still have fond memories of "twin kingdom valley" which was released back in 1983. (the graphics were necessarily crude, given the technology of the time, but surprisingly evocative)
I wrote one in z80 assembly language, to amuse my child.
Making it with such a constrained environment, and language, made it a bit of a challenge. But the end result is that you can run it on any CP/M system you have around! (Or online.)
I am actually in the process of writing one in Lua to amuse my child! He's not yet a very strong reader nor typist, so to begin with the story will progress just by moving around, similar to Inside the Facility[1]. This is also to help keep the parser simple – I don't really want to write a parser, but I do need to implement the basics to get an engine in my child's native language.
In this case I chose Lua not for its suitability to the problem but because the computer my child has is a NetBSD machine with few things besides Lua installed on it.
Not even connected to the internet! Whicih is why I picked a BSD -- fairly complete on its own. We'll see how long I can keep it up. I hope to make "connecting to the internet" a temporary thing done for a specific purpose and then one disconnects.
