On Buddy Simulator 1984's Text Adventure Game
Buddy Simulator 1984 is a video game where you play a series of increasingly complex games with your "Buddy", a "learning" AI, who drops increasingly worrisome red flags that he's not the most stable, and has issues. It is about 90% a top-down rpg horror game, with a few bits of non-rpg elements. It's fun, quirky, but also unsettling at times with a lot of dark comedy.
I'd easily recommend it, especially if you are someone who has gone through at least the basics of programming and video game design. This thing is a labor of love, but you'll recognize the programming exercises at the beginning and the game's satire on poor video game design during the rpg segments.
That being said, I REALLY want to praise the text adventure game. It lasts for about 2% of the game. You'd easily forget it, if it wasn't right at the intro and so different than the later parts.
For those who do not know, a text adventure game a very underrated type of video game genre where you interact with a game by directly typing your responses to various situations directly into the interface. The video game itself is a series of messages sent to you by the computer games as a response as to what you put in. There are no graphics. Just text.
It is cheap, good to learn beginner-level programming in, and allows a lot of creativity since, like novels and other purely written media, it relies solely on the user's imagination and the text.
HOWEVER, it has a lot of cons.
1. a lot of video game users are put off by the lack of graphics. Video games are very different immersion wise from books, and this step between can be very discomforting to modern players.
2. Text adventures are one of the easiest ways to teach new programmers (especially those who want to go into video game design) why limiting what your players can do is a good thing.
This leads into two cons. There is a relatively small hurdle to go over to program one of these things so it's a good intro to programming, but that means that a lot of programmers will be publishing their first work here.
As any artist in ANY medium can tell you, your first work, heck your first few works are going to suck. It's a fact of life. Wanna draw? You'll have to get past your stick people and wobbly circle phase. Wanna sing? You'll be squeaky and pitchy at first. Play an instrument? Those wrong notes are going to be common. And programming is HARD.
So, you'll have problem 3a: it's a lot programmers' first few pieces so issues with writing, creativity, themes, and code will be common. You'll have to wade through a lot of muck to find the gems.
Then, problem 3b: An inexperienced programmer almost never realizes just how many different ideas a player is going to have. In order to play the game, you have to have a response to each one. But if you're inexperienced, you may not realize that an interaction that seems obvious to you may not work for a player. Or a player might use synonyms to the action you want or misspell or just not know their options. Depending on the system they're using, they might even use different capitalizations and cause errors that way.
Watching a new programmer watch a player playtest his game is like watching someone slowly implode as they realize how differently this player will think and how many different ways this user will screw over hours and hours of work. Most video game genres avoid this by limiting what a player can do, but a text adventure can't, and if there's no help screen for a list of commands and interactable objects, your player will be furious, your programmer (if they see the player/playtest/get feedback) will be frustrated, and the game is going to be hard, just because of the interface.
It's a lesson any programmer worth their salt needs to learn, but it's a hard one. It'll break some programmers if they have no guidance or reassurance that this is normal. This is expected.
And all of this leads up to my argument that the text adventure in Buddy simulator is AWESOME.
A lot of people think the first 4 games (5 if you count Buddy's "game" of looking at a piece of text he found in his files) suck and are boring. And yes, the first 3 games are simplistic child's games, but clearly have much more effort than they needed to in them.
For example, rock, paper, scissors is an easy game that is commonly used to teach young progammers how to use a very basic random number generator and evaluate values. Typically, the programmer would just write rock/paper/scissors for each person (or have the user use a 1: rock/2: paper/3:scissors menu to prevent the risk of misspellings) and write you win/lose/tie to show the results. The creator went the extra mile and used ASCII art (where you make images out of the characters on the keyboard) to animate the hand gestures you'd use in a real life game.
The text adventure though was made by someone who was EXPERIENCED and a pro. It has a fully functioning help menu which lists all available commands. All interactable items are in all-caps so they are easily visible. The hint system isn't so obvious it's condescending, and because it's "your buddy" it had a personality I genuinely enjoyed and added a new layer to your game. All of the solutions made sense in a video game way, and I really only had trouble with one puzzle (interface wise) which I could easily brute force since the interface was so user-friendly. It was creative, quirky, and very playable.
It avoided all the common pitfalls of a text adventure game, and I would EASILY recommend Buddy Simulator 1984 to any beginner programmer learning text adventure programming (a vital step in many video game programmers' education) just for that text adventure alone. The programmer of that section knew their text adventures and ACED it. The fact that it's dismissed for being "boring" and not "video-game"-y enough saddens me, and so I'm giving it kudos here.
Congrats Buddy Simulator 1984, for giving a fine example of a text adventure, and your later rpg elements ain't half bad either. I'll give you the best of kudos. This game was a product of love and passion, and you deserve love for your underrated text game.
49 notes
·
View notes