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[qhead]

I'm building experimental text-based user interface where user can express their wishes via "I want to..." type of expression. I want it to be more like a real-life RPG where you can essentially issue any command and the gamemaster replies based on that, and not Day of the Tentacle type few context based choices style. I want to go mobile-first which means very small screen sizes and essentially only input mechanic is tapping choices.

I'm stuck at coming up with a UI model that displays a very large number of choices for the user in a way that it's still fast to use. The idea is that user could construct a sentence like "I want to [ move ] [to the other room]" or "I want to [ open ] [the box] and [look inside]". In the future I want to try to build some sort of predictive model that will highlight the probable choices in the context but still keep the flexibility to create any sentence that the language allows.

So does anybody have a good example, know existing discussion (tried search but didn't find anything) or have some other ideas how to approach this?

[readyplaygames]

Maybe drag and drop words to make a sentence?

[valrus]

As a starting place, you might look at the Legend Entertainment hybrid text adventures (like Gateway or Timequest), where they tried to update text adventures to the new GUI-and-mouse era. 

Those long tall scrolling frames could be compressed into spinners (e.g. http://i.stack.imgur.com/KYtFW.png or http://i.stack.imgur.com/X1X9J.jpg) and placed at the bottom of the interface, each spinner coming into existence when the spinner to its left is finished.

So you could choose "open" in the first spinner, and the second will come into existence with the list of possible openable items, and when you choose "the box", the third comes into existence with the choices { ".", "and", "with" }.  The command is executed when a period is chosen.  (The spinners may need to start scrolling off the screen to the left to fit longer sentences, though.)

Note the dual sorting of the verbs in the Legend Entertainment interfaces, where the most common commands are sorted by frequency but the full range of commands is sorted alphabetically.  That's a good compromise; you don't have to scroll much to find a common verb, but when you do have to scroll you find a verb more easily.

[voidSkipper]

I honestly think your predictive text idea is the FIRST direction you should go in.

From a mobile point of view I can't think of anything that would be more convenient than that, and I also feel like it would guide the user to interesting gameplay - it's like when you go to google something and get distracted by an interesting choice in the suggested search drop down menu.

The player starts typing "I want to loot the body" but gets suggested "I want to lick the wall" and thinks "wait, I can do that!?"

[qhead]

As a starting place, you might look at the Legend Entertainment hybrid text adventures (like Gateway or Timequest), where they tried to update text adventures to the new GUI-and-mouse era. 

Those long tall scrolling frames could be compressed into spinners (e.g. http://i.stack.imgur.com/KYtFW.png or http://i.stack.imgur.com/X1X9J.jpg) and placed at the bottom of the interface, each spinner coming into existence when the spinner to its left is finished.

So you could choose "open" in the first spinner, and the second will come into existence with the list of possible openable items, and when you choose "the box", the third comes into existence with the choices { ".", "and", "with" }.  The command is executed when a period is chosen.  (The spinners may need to start scrolling off the screen to the left to fit longer sentences, though.)

Note the dual sorting of the verbs in the Legend Entertainment interfaces, where the most common commands are sorted by frequency but the full range of commands is sorted alphabetically.  That's a good compromise; you don't have to scroll much to find a common verb, but when you do have to scroll you find a verb more easily.

Thanks for the game examples! I do agree that the ever-expanding spinners is an idea worth of try. One thing that might be a good addition is a search field above the spinner so if you know it's rare verb starting with V, you can just jump directly to it instead of scrolling for ages. Also if I start structuring the sentence on the upper part of the screen, it doesn't matter if spinners go away as long as you can tap the part of the sentence you want to edit later on.

I actually was thinking about using spinners earlier but dismissed it partly because spinners are really boring visually

I honestly think your predictive text idea is the FIRST direction you should go in.

From a mobile point of view I can't think of anything that would be more convenient than that, and I also feel like it would guide the user to interesting gameplay - it's like when you go to google something and get distracted by an interesting choice in the suggested search drop down menu.

The player starts typing "I want to loot the body" but gets suggested "I want to lick the wall" and thinks "wait, I can do that!?"

I do agree. However the problem with predictive UIs is "muscle memory". Of course I'm not saying that this won't work, bit there's some research done about this, and the experiments that have been done with predictive OS GUIs and context menus have resulted in more frustration than productivity. I think this might be more of a communication/visual language issue combined with repetitive tasks. I'll need to experiment with this whether your brain can grasp it.

[voidSkipper]

The text needs to be "unintrusively" predictive. For example, if it auto-corrects, or auto-inserts when you press the space bar or enter or any other key that you would usually use during fast, muscle-memory-learned input, then you're going to get frustrated.

If you have the suggestions somewhere where the user can select them separately or ignore them and keep typing, this would be ideal.

SwiftKey (the android keyboard) for example, has never bothered me with predictive text or corrections, because I can ignore them if I so choose without any modification to my typing habits. I have to make a conscious movement to accept a suggestion.

An idea, for example, would be to have the possible predictions as a "word cloud" above the typing input line, and have them be gradually narrowed down as the user types. At any time, the user could select a word from the cloud to replace/complete the current word.

[qhead]

The text needs to be "unintrusively" predictive. For example, if it auto-corrects, or auto-inserts when you press the space bar or enter or any other key that you would usually use during fast, muscle-memory-learned input, then you're going to get frustrated.

If you have the suggestions somewhere where the user can select them separately or ignore them and keep typing, this would be ideal.

SwiftKey (the android keyboard) for example, has never bothered me with predictive text or corrections, because I can ignore them if I so choose without any modification to my typing habits. I have to make a conscious movement to accept a suggestion.

An idea, for example, would be to have the possible predictions as a "word cloud" above the typing input line, and have them be gradually narrowed down as the user types. At any time, the user could select a word from the cloud to replace/complete the current word.

You're right. One feature even further would be to gather statistical data on what sentences are used and give those as well - iOS predictive shortcut style. Not sure if SwiftKey does this also because I haven't used it, but I think we're on the same page.

Word cloud idea is interesting. That would be interesting with bubble chart style where the predicted probability correlates with the same. Basically same idea as with word cloud, but a bit easier to grasp visually because elements are contained as bubbles. Another one I had was some sort of UI inspired by Sankey diagram but that's hard to do in a small screen.

[valrus]

This approaches a gimmick but it could be a lot of fun for both you and the player:

There really aren't that many verbs and objects starting with any particular letter that can be interpreted as relevant to a given scene.  (Like looking around my current room, I can only see maybe 5-10 obvious things that start with C, and a real room is a thousand times more detail-rich than a description of a room in a text adventure.)  So there aren't that many instances where predictive text entry can be relevant beyond the first letter.

So run with it.  Give a standard mobile keyword, have the player type in a short sequence of single letters like "SCT", then attempt to interpret it as effective instructions w.r.t. the scene and inventory ("SCARE the COUGAR with the TORCH") and, if there isn't a way to make SCT into an effective instruction, interpret it as something that will fail in a funny way ("SCARE the COUGAR with TELEKINESIS").

This would be hard for an arbitrary text adventure written with a standard parser in mind, but entirely possible if you subtly set things up the world to make it easy on yourself, like

(a) maximizing the first-letter distinctiveness of object-relevant items in a scene, and
(b) making sure that most letters have a potential match word in each scene, while
(c) trying to have a bunch of systematic funny-fail words like "TELEKINESIS" will all funny-fail in the same way ("You concentrate as hard as you can but surprisingly nothing moves!"), so that you don't have to write tens of thousands of unique failure responses, and
(d) having a system of grammatical variation so that you can respond to SCT and TCS ("use the TORCH to SCARE the COUGAR") using the same response message.

(This sounds combinatorically very complex, of course, but it's literally millions of times less complex than responding intelligently when the player has full freedom to choose the words and the sentence structure.)