For weeks I toiled over something that I knew was a risk and a crazy endeavor in terms of Flash gaming. It’s an entirely text-based game called Llama Adventure. The game has seven rooms of puzzles and plenty of interesting mechanics. No, it’s not a surgery game and it’s not a techno-throbbing ADD rush. It’s a game that steers completely the other direction, but that’s something I am proud of.
I’ve never made a Text-Based Adventure like this, or have I even beat or played one for more than a few minutes. This is new to me. And with that, I wanted the experience of creating something I had little experience with. Perhaps I could bring something new to the genre with fresh eyes and fingers. It’s new frontiers for me, nothing is safe about making a game like this. I equate it to building a biplane when I’ve been building gliders all my life and then jumping in.
And with that risk, a strange occurrence happened in the creation of this game. I have never had MORE FUN making a game in my life. The production of this game was a breath of fresh air from the usual grind of balls, guns, and swords. I got to mess around with virtual environment and build rooms out of sentences and form words around puzzles. It was a strangely invigorating process.
30+ pages of writing went into the game. Each room needed to be built with objects that interact with each other differently. The action from player had to correlate with the action that could be received from the computer, and in-sequence had to be triggered in order or else end in llama disaster. The programming per room was about 400 lines of code each, built on a text-parsing thingamabob I built.
Keywords and phrases built upon the idea that verbs directly affect nouns, and that nouns could create relationships with other nouns. When a player said to “look at _____” the engine figured out each word and realized how to use it. The game would even light up phrases if they were legitimate things to say to help the player. The engine also recognizes different ways of saying the same thing. “Go to next room” means the same as “go to other room” and “move through the door” by picking up on what the nouns and verbs were in the sentence.
The story was built from the idea that each room was a “kill room,” a room with a set of instructions and objects that must be used in the right way to move on. It’s a way of isolating the player in containers before letting them move into other containers. Containers allowed me to work between the levels very quickly and test things without much crazy manipulation of code.
In the game there are only two real characters. The “Master” of the lab acts as an MC throughout all the lab rooms. He is a lunatic for sure, a deranged man who treats you terrible yet you can only feel bad for. And you, the Llama, are his test subject, one of 44 specimens who have past through the lab previous.
I can’t expect epic scores from Flash game websites or can I expect that this will at all be the game to end all games. The ability to sit a player down and tell them to read seems unfathomable for this day and age. But what I hope is that I can give a few players a really fun experience and let them have a moment to interact with a unique story and level design that is unfamiliar to those who didn’t have the early computer generation as a reference. Just as I am unfamiliar with this genre, I hope others who are unfamiliar can play and enjoy the game as well.
So enjoy! And I would love feedback.
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