Workshop: Write Your Own Text Based Adventure/Puzzle Game

[carwyn]

Creative North Wales have a Powering Up the Video Games Industry event being arranged by M-SParc on April 21st 2021 from 2pm that we've been invited to arrange a workshop to co-incide with later the same day.

My idea is to do something a bit like the "Make your own 80's video game event" Gareth ran for us but learn from the software installation and online format issues we had during those events.

Something a bit like: Creating a Text-Based Adventure and Quiz Game in Python but massively multiplayer using something like https://replit.com/ which can allow up to 50 people to edit the same code file.

See: Draft Meetup Event

[carwyn]

They have a strong lineup for the Powering Up the Video Games Industry event:

• The role of games and interactive movies within the sector - Dr David Banner MBE, Wales Interactive
• From hobbyist to the BAFTAs - Gaz Thomas, Freegames.org
• At the cutting edge of VR - Dr Llyr ap Cenydd, Bangor University
• Levelling Up: The Evolution of Games Courses & Student Opportunities - Richard Hebblewhite, Wrexham Glyndŵr University
• Meet the Makers - Quantum Soup and Front Grid Ltd.

I'll also be participating in this event immediately after this event too: Copyright Licensing and ICT

[carwyn]

Background info:

• List of text-based computer games (Wikipedia)
• http://textadventures.co.uk/ - loads of online text based games to play.
• https://www.torn.com/ - popular text based online RPG.

Of particular note is the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (video game) which the BBC have a playable version of here The Game - 30th Anniversary Edition. Also see this article about the game: 1984: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

[carwyn]

Along with using something like https://replit.com/ for the workshop itself, I'll give a short talk about real world software that can and is used to build text based games:

• https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/
• http://inform7.com/
• https://yarnspinner.dev/
• https://twinery.org/
• https://www.renpy.org/

And maybe mention a few free tools for making more conventional games:

• https://love2d.org/
• https://www.pygame.org/
• https://kaboomjs.com/
• https://html5gameengine.com/
• https://godotengine.org/
• https://unity.com/
• https://www.unrealengine.com/

[carwyn]

The lack of games companies in North Wales on this map is worth mentioning: https://gamesmap.uk/#/map

[carwyn]

Python ASCII art tools: https://pypi.org/project/art/

[carwyn]

We've tried two online hands-on workshops now and learned an lot from both. I think that the pre-canned repl.it, no need to install locally worked (compared to what we've seen in other real and virutal workshops) but the number of concurrent editors and differences in experience level was confusing. The mutliplayer debugging was terrible :)