I'd love to know the 'design patterns' of works like this Knights of San Francisco game. Did the author use a workflow engine, a rules engine, functional event sourcing, a nested pyramid of if-then-else doom?<p>I have a sense that this space is somewhat unexplored. Text-based game world simulation is a relatively underdocumented (to my eyes) form of the 'game UI overtop a database manipulated with game logic rules' type of games, of which Simulation games are at the complex end of.<p>There are things like Twine and Inky that offer variables and conditionals to prewritten bodies of text, but doing composable texts worlds that change their state based on the accumulated choices of players over the course of their time seems to be a complex feature to build and extend, whether in Twine or another tool. Dialog simulation systems that remember what options you've done and give you additional options or changes over the course of the game are sold as products online. Heck, someone recently patented a 'grudge' system that a popular game (League of Legends?) used.<p>Or maybe I've just been looking too closely at it. I've been working slowly for about the past 2 years on an automation system for a tabletop RPG (non D-20 system) to speed up battle generation & resolution, trying to incorporate all of the various rules that say 'in X scenario, if Y conditions are met, gather this information from the user, then apply its Z effect like so, but also let the DM / user change any of the above or ignore the entire thing before you do so', so while I've ordered Designing Data Intensive Applications in hopes of gaining more insights, this problem certainly seems like a big thing to chew on from my self-taught programmer's POV right now.
I really love the ideas expressed here and on the home page, especially (ie., just personally, a side-note if context) as text adventure games have been a focal point between my non-gameing SO and I in an ongoing debate on where to draw the line on what counts as a "game". Anyone got with experience with the "Knights of San Francisco"?<p><a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=egamebook.com.flutteregamebook&hl=en_US&gl=US" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=egamebook.com....</a>
Perhaps it was just the time in my life that I played it, but the most immersive experience I had playing a game was a text based MUD called Achaea. I've tried to recapture that experience unsuccessfully.<p>The lack of focus on graphics meant that complexity of description and systems didn't need to have visual work to go along with it, which allowed for much more complex systems than I'd seen in any game at the time.
i've been thinking a lot lately about how i could design a civ-like game with a core mechanic more like hamurabi [<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamurabi_(video_game)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamurabi_(video_game)</a>]. the output needn't be purely textual (e.g. the game could display a map, or graphics of various entities), but the input would just involve making decisions about various variables, and the simulation engine would take care of the rest and show you the outcome.
A good system for describing a game could also be used to help create narration of movies for visually impaired people. Or even descriptions of audio for those with hearing loss.
This seems like something that might dovetail rather neatly with some of the work that Richard Evans has done. "Little Text People" for example.