Text adventures as a category always struck me as kind of lonely. They often take place in environments where all the people have been removed, like miniature apocalypses.
It seems technically fairly obvious why this happens: other people are too hard to model. People have goals and expectations and so someone traipsing around trying random things is not generally acceptable, and creating characters that are disinterested in their environment is its own challenge. (Writing this I realize grumpy and stubborn characters are fairly common, maybe for these same reasons!)
In all these years of advancement in games the NPC still seems either lifeless or absent. I'm afraid I haven't actually played your games, so I don't know how you've tried to address it, but I'm sure you've thought about it. I'd be curious to hear any of those thoughts, but maybe specific questions:
1. Have you had any successes you could share in making a NPC seem "alive"?
2. Any ideas you were convinced were great but failed when implemented?
3. Do you think new technology can be applied to this? For instance it sounds like you are using more advanced NLP in Escape the Gloomer. (But understanding is only half, NPC motivation and goals seem equally hard.)
4. Does a strong NPC distract from the autonomy of the player? (Sometimes I wonder if people even want a strong NPC, or if players actually prefer NPCs to be background.)
5. And separately, have you tried AI Dungeon and if so what did you think?
1) yes this has always been an issue. My early Marvel games had to deal with this as there were numerous characters to interact with. In Escape the Gloomer I mostly avoided it as Gillig is trying to stay hidden so you just get to hear conversations. In Adventureland XL I brought by my old friend the pirate. And you do get have some interactions with him as well as Robin's Merry Men. Still not very deep or rich
2) That's harder to answer. I have done a lot of things that may not have panned out commericially but I enjoyed the technical challenge and was happy with the results. I never see failure, just an oppurtunity to improve something :)
3) I am sure it could be, just not an area I have been spending much time addressing!
4) Depends on the game of course. So many of my games are more puzzle based so having an strong NPC isn't really needed there. But I did have fun with both the Pirate and the Chimpanzee in Adventureland XL !
5) AI dungeon is an interesting idea. Each iteration gets more and more promising. But still has a ways to go yet.
Play Galatea. It’s a famous, award winning parser game about a conversation with a sentient statue and has approx 70 endings. The game models your relationship along several axes as you go and the writing is superb
I'm trying it and it's _really_ hard to get any commands to work.
Maybe I thought it would be more like Facade. Stuff like "Ask galatea her favorite color" and "tell galatea her dress is pretty" aren't working. It's moving really slow (minutes between attempts) as I try to guess what keywords I can use.
I can't even "examine room" like I usually do for conversation. "You can't see any such thing".
Did you try typing "help", which gives you the following rather verbose block of text:
----
This is an exercise in NPC interactivity. There's no puzzle and no set solution, but a number of options with a number of different outcomes.
HINTS: Ask or tell her about things that you can see, that she mentions, or that you think of yourself. Interact with her physically. Pause to see if she does anything herself. Repeat actions. The order in which you do things is critical: the character's mood and the prior state of the conversation will determine how she reacts.
VERBS: Many standard verbs have been disabled. All the sensory ones (LOOK, LISTEN, SMELL, TOUCH, TASTE) remain, as do the NPC interaction verbs ASK, TELL, HELLO, GOODBYE, and SORRY; KISS, HUG, and ATTACK. You may also find useful THINK and its companion THINK ABOUT, which will remind you of the state of conversation on a given topic. The verb RECAP gives a summary list of topics that you've discussed so far; if she's told you that she's said all she knows on that topic, it appears in italics.
SHORTCUT: 'Ask her about' and 'tell her about' may be abbreviated to A and T. So >A CHEESE is the same as >ASK GALATEA ABOUT CHEESE.
I also had a hard time moving it forward. Mostly asking about single words picked from the text worked best, but as a result it feels a bit like choose your own adventure but with hidden choices. And I'd try to ask about things that seemed important and get "You can't form your question into words" only to try with different words later and finally get some information. (But I always have this problem with IF... maybe I'm not patient enough, or have to learn the typical IF vocabulary, or maybe I just word things in funny ways, I don't know.)
I think most of the commands are of the form “talk about x” “tell about x” and “ask about x.” There are also “Galatea, come here” type commands. It definitely takes some some experimentation to figure the parser out unfortunately
AI Dungeon is amusing but it's not a game, it's a toy. Text adventures are actual games with rules and objectives and (usually) a final goal. AI Dungeon is more like lucid dreaming in that you can do anything you want, there are no consequences, and reality is essentially putty in your hands. For people who want to play a game and challenge themselves to solve puzzles figure out the plot I think they will be very disappointed with AI Dungeon.
Yes, I think the lucid dreaming analogy is apt. That said, these games aren't just puzzles, they are also imaginary worlds. AI Dungeon might be approaching the sense of being in another world from another direction. Text adventures generally start with a small set of unforgiving rules, and AI Dungeon starts with inferred and easily broken rules.
But another part of games is the meta-game where you get into the game designers head, try to figure out how they would have setup the puzzle, knowing that challenges are designed to be solvable. In AI Dungeon this is also true in a sense, except you are getting in the head of an alien intelligence that has read human writing extensively.
Versu story [0] was an engine for creating interactive stories that was specifically designed for including easily lively NPCs. I never tried it though, and unfortunately, the project was abandoned [1] although it sounded very promising.
In addition to Galatea, "Varicella" and "Alias Magpie" come to mind. In those, NPCs are not the primary focus, but there are some amusing ones and the world seemed alive to me.
Ahem. If you just played "advent", they may look empty.
Go Play Planetfall, Anchorhead or Curses!. Your little robotic friend will get you amazed.
AI Dungeon is not a game at all. Far from a text adventure.
Since Inform6 and Curses! text adventures are far more complex than the ones
for the 80's microcomputers which they barely could run Zork, really slow in some extreme cases.
As I said, Infocom games for DOS/Amiga (and any new Z-Machine non-alpha adventure) are much better in that regard.
Text adventures as a category always struck me as kind of lonely. They often take place in environments where all the people have been removed, like miniature apocalypses.
It seems technically fairly obvious why this happens: other people are too hard to model. People have goals and expectations and so someone traipsing around trying random things is not generally acceptable, and creating characters that are disinterested in their environment is its own challenge. (Writing this I realize grumpy and stubborn characters are fairly common, maybe for these same reasons!)
In all these years of advancement in games the NPC still seems either lifeless or absent. I'm afraid I haven't actually played your games, so I don't know how you've tried to address it, but I'm sure you've thought about it. I'd be curious to hear any of those thoughts, but maybe specific questions:
1. Have you had any successes you could share in making a NPC seem "alive"?
2. Any ideas you were convinced were great but failed when implemented?
3. Do you think new technology can be applied to this? For instance it sounds like you are using more advanced NLP in Escape the Gloomer. (But understanding is only half, NPC motivation and goals seem equally hard.)
4. Does a strong NPC distract from the autonomy of the player? (Sometimes I wonder if people even want a strong NPC, or if players actually prefer NPCs to be background.)
5. And separately, have you tried AI Dungeon and if so what did you think?