I was just thinking earlier today on what might make a neat game, and this theme is a perfect match.
I’ll give you one hint: John Conway’s Game of Life
That’s where my idea stems from, but I’m using it only as a supporting gameplay mechanic.
By the way, I have a live feed going at http://www.livestream.com/madksludumdare16
Yes, the most incredible graphics you will ever lay eyes on are right here.
Looks too intense!Coming along quickly. So far, you can learn a bit of backstory and find a key to a locked room. Oh, and get yelled at by the King, too.
This game may be text based, but it’s got it where it counts. It has a cool story, and awesomesauce NPCs. Not to mention loads of typos. 😀
Well, I think I’m making good progress on my entry.
Good luck to all, and may the best man win!
Awesome pixel artwork is going to accompany the approriate areas. I don’t think my final game will have an ending, per se, though it could. I just want to keep adding content till I get bored, really.
I’m the one with the text based castle themed TextAge game.
a (nearly) finished image:
WIP image:
I’m retiring for tonight. Have fun, everybody.
My game just got a HUGE graphic overhall. It’s still text-based and everything, but it is much more stylized and stuff. I also composed some music for it. If I make a complete story with an ending (which I think I will end up accomplishing) then I’ll make more than just a 30 second looping song. :p
I’ve finished my first LD contest and I’m pleased with what came out of my work.
I want to thank Summoner, Sjogras, Zarkith, and Zachariasmith for keeping me company on my live feed, for their encouragement and playtesting.
I’m updating my entry with a couple typos fixes and using much more coherent wording in one sentence.
dertom says …
Hehe,…nice nice! I really was a big fan of the old c64-textadventure of “The Hobbit”. Would be cool, if you had this effects were the pictures are drawn “realtime” and “real slow” 😀 But the graphics brought me back to that time…
Good job
I’m glad the game had some nostalgic value for you! The graphics were more of a last-minute thing, so I didn’t develop them that much.
SonnyBone says …
Was that a Joker reference in a text adventure game?
I THINK IT WAS!
I enjoyed the twists and turns here, but some of the text was hard to follow as it jumped up the page after a command.
I expirimented with different ways to pop the text up, and this way seemed best, though it does have its imperfections. During the 48 hours I wanted to make a game with an impressive gameplay, so I lost focus on making the text presentable.
C418 says …
Hm, I think it’s okay. I’m not a real sucker for text adventures. I don’t think I’ll rate it as I didn’t play far.
‘Okay’ is still a good thing to hear!
Cosr says …
That was very amusingly written. Takes maybe a few to many tries to find everything when searching.
Yea, I probably should’ve made necessary items come up more frequently.
Hamumu says …
I couldn’t get past the priest… I even went all the way back to see if the servant would give me what he needed, but either no, or I couldn’t word it right (actually yes, but it doesn’t count). I have to say that even once I understood the concept of how it would make you press enter and that the yellow line indicated it was actually command time, I still CONSTANTLY was typing ignored commands to my endless frustration. Some text adventure conventions would’ve been very nice, like the prompt meaning you can type things, and I for inventory, and the NESW movement. Nice artwork behind the text!
Yea, I might have fixed that had I adequate time to give some thought to this. It annoyed me too, but I was so concentrated on bugfinding that it slipped my mind to fix that. As for the priest, if you got the dagger and the King fell out the window, you can find the necessary item by searching in the loud room.
Hempuli says …
I can guess that it’s hard to make a proper parser-based text adventure in 48 hours!
You bet it was 😛
ippa says …
first about your comment: the area you got stuck in was about the only red herring I had in the game, it’s not very hard to jump out of though. Give it another shot, go to the right in the beginning and find the way out from there, it will take 3 minutes of your life and I’ll promise to put a smile on your face in the end :).
Onto your game: I liked the pixely gfx, the whole setup reminded me of early kings quest but without the animated character. I haven’t played many text-based games, and that might be the reason I didn’t get very far. I tried asking the servant for various things, a key and crown being the first ones :).. but he didn’t seem to understand anything I said. I would love some tips there, is it “give me the key”, “get key” or just “key” or any other combination.. nothing seemed to work. While the gfx was nice I got really hard to read on certain backgrounds, maybe putting it in a black box at the bottom would have helped with that. Or even better, in a full-length black box at the right side.
I really wished I could have gotten further on this one since it seemed like you put some serious work into it.
The servant is actually there just for kicks, sort of meant to be a little bonus. No, you can’t actually get anything from her except some backstory. (Ask her about dragons, the king, the queen, who you are, etc.) In order to find items to progress with the game, you’ll need to search for them in a couple of places. Hint: the copper key can be found in the loud room.
I got a lot of positive feedback on this game! Thanks for the comments guys, and I hope you enjoyed playing it as much as I did making it 
I’ve got the bare basics going. Selection and movement and combat all work, so now I have to get the actual gameplay going. I am coding in BlitzMax. It’s going to play just a lil’ bit like Euphoria when everything is set. I plan to enhance the graphics with more variety later if I have the time.
All that’s left to make this game presentable is a decent computer opponent (it’s quite broken at the moment) and to fix the numerous bugs involved with turrets. After that I’ll be adding a ton of bells and whistles to keep the game exciting.
This feature took way too long to implement. I had to write a description of every single thing in the game. There are quite a few. The only thing it doesn’t do (and probably won’t for sake of time developing the find-the-exact-location algorithms) is give you infromation on structures already built onto an island. Excuse me — skyland. Yeah. That’s right. Ain’t no islands to see here.
I want to give Perrin an award for his game, but I can’t because he doesn’t have any journal posts.
I want to give people awards for their games, but I can’t because they don’t have any journal posts.
Hurrah for placeholder graphics, no?
Anyway, I’ve got basic enemy AI all tidy and everything so that’ll be very easy to both create and adjust. Now I need to make weapon AI, and then make the player thing move.
A lot less of the graphics are placeholders now.
My game has some basics in terms of gameplay and no audio, but at least my graphics don’t suck too painfully badly at this point
The gameplay is almost complete. Now I have 12 hours to cram in some sound and some content.
This is the name of my game! You can’t have it.
First playable build. Still no sound, and hardly any game content, but just putting it out there: