What are Text
Adventures?
Text Adventures (now commonly referred to as Interactive Fiction) are a cross
between reading a book and playing a game, where you control the main character. Rather than reading the story from start to
finish, you interact with everything by typing commands at a prompt,
discovering things as you go along. Well written games give you, the
player, the impression that anything you type is understood by giving a
sensible and meaningful response. Indeed, part of
the fun of playing text adventure games is discovering responses to
things you didn't expect to have been catered for.
Most text adventures follow the same basic rules - these include
walking from location to location using compass directions (north, east,
south-west etc). You can normally pick objects up, drop them, put them on
things, talk to characters, push things and much more.
This
handy sheet for beginners explains many common commands used in games.
How do you create
Text Adventure games?
There are several different systems for creating Text Adventures. All have
their advantages and disadvantages. However, all of the alternatives
require you to do some sort of programming.
ADRIFT is different by being a completely GUI driven application,
designed to be intuitive and easy to use. ADRIFT also has a long standing reputation
for being the easiest system to use for creating text adventures.
ADRIFT has a separate editor for each item you want to add to your game.
The editors are intuitive, and simply require you to fill in the
descriptions, and make choices from dropdown menus.
About ADRIFT Developer
ADRIFT Developer is a Windows application that allows you to create complex
text adventure games quickly and easily. It allows you to concentrate
on the story by making everything else easy, such as having all options available in
dropdown lists, rather than you having to spend a lot of time just trying to figure out
how to code the game. Games in ADRIFT are created by adding locations,
objects, characters and tasks. These can be organised into folders,
allowing you to group things together in a logical manner.
ADRIFT 5 Developer is free. However, if you enjoy the software and use it regularly
you are encouraged to make a
donation to support it's ongoing development.
About ADRIFT Runner
ADRIFT Runner is the application used to play ADRIFT games. It currently
runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and within Web browsers, effectively allowing ADRIFT games to run on any
platform. Runner has a built in map, which follows the player's
movements within the game, showing you everywhere you have been. The map is
3D and can be rotated to allow different view points.
ADRIFT Runner is free.
