next »

[nunix]

I don't know how to code! This is okay because I kind of don't like it. =/ But this makes it difficult when I have a little game-y thing I want to do, even if it's structurally simple, because going around asking coder friends to do stuff for me is boring and lame.

What I'm looking for is either an engine that can handle this easily, or source code (well-documented and bare-bones) for a sample game of this type.

What kind of game, you ask?

Text-based something-management! The sort of thing Wizard Games did. They did a game called Rockstar, as well as several other games (mostly soccer, one horseracing). You're in control of the day-to-day decisions for something (an individual person, a group of people, a city, whatever), and the stats of the something + random outside forces interact to give you choices and impact your performance. Generally either score or goal based (i.e. sell x copies of a song, play to an audience of this size).

Requirements:

* can play with it in OSX. if it works in more than OSX, bonus (i.e. cross-platform or web-based is fine)

* can customise the static menu sections with relative ease (instead of having the bottom half of the screen be a menu, move it to the right 1/3rd of the screen, and have a secondary one along the bottom)

* pretty easy to make new classes/variables of data to track

Sooo.. anyone got one for me? ;p This is not-not-not a request for work, just looking to see if something modular for this kind of game already exists.

[BlueSweatshirt]

Game Maker, some time in the near future.

Besides that, to me it seems like you might be out of luck. 

[mcc]

I don't think you're looking for something like game maker. If you want a text based engine you most likely want to look for "interactive fiction" (that exact string will turn up a lot of stuff on google) engines, such as Inform. There is a big community for this stuff so tutorials or templates for Inform should be easy to find.

Alternately, really what might work even better, given what you want seems to be less about text parsing and more about algorithmic stuff? I'd suggest just picking up a tutorial for Python. Python is an easy to use "real" programming language that gets you to the point where you are able to do complex text operations fairly quickly. You can run it in the OS X "terminal" (I think there's also a way to make standalone programs) and once you learn it to the point where you can make a text-based game you'll be in a good position to try it with graphical or web stuff.

[nunix]

I'm quite familiar with IF, but I don't think Inform or TADS or any of that will really help me. Here's a couple of mock-ups for what I'm talking about (you can also find Rockstar out there on the web; you used to be able to buy the Wizard Games collection, but their website has either been hacked or taken over by a crazy person, so.. let your conscience be your guide in that regard ;).





So I've got two static panes or information panels, on the right-hand side, and then along the bottom. The top-left section scrolls the events, and the bottom pane switches what options are displayed based on context. The game is going to be tracking a lot of events, and IF stuff is generally pretty simple, so I don't think it'll work for this.

I'm aware of Python and similar scripting languages, but.. like I said, I'm not a coder, I'm not eager to dive in. Was hoping there was something bare-bones that would at least get the display working how I'd like, maybe with some sample data arrays or something for tracking data, and then I could expand and tweak from there.

[Mipe]

Not a coder? Have you tried Construct?

[magnum_opus]

I don't know if it's what you're looking for but there's Twine
http://gimcrackd.com/etc/src/

a couple of examples from somebody learning it can be seen
http://www.auntiepixelante.com/?p=471
http://www.auntiepixelante.com/?p=472

there's also http://www.questml.com/ which is aparently similar.

[Dacke]

To me, it sounds like actually coding it would be the easy route. I personally find it much, much harder to figure out how to make things work in game-making-programs. Finding source code for something would probably be a good idea. Or you could ask one of your programmer-friends to make a small skeleton for you. Setting up a structure, that you can fill out with content and logic should be fairly easy. Hope you can figure it out!

[nunix]

Thanks for the suggestions. Someone let me know Inform actually will do panes/panels, so that's an option.. I guess I'm just going to have to code it myself (or get someone to do a code skellington to work off of). ;_; I knew it was kind of a longshot, though, so life goes on!

[Dacke]

I think most of the work lies in creating the game logic, and you would have to create that either way

[mcc]

You could do this in python by using the built-in "curses" library to do the nice text formatting stuff. There is also a library called "urwid" that would likely be easier to use than curses. I don't have much familiarity with IF engines though so I don't really know what to tell you if you go that route.