I appreciate this is not the type of text adventure Twine is designed to create, but would it be massively complicated to do so?
I'm referring to this type of affair:
You are in a forest. To the west lies a cabin, while a stream runs east.
>|
(Where > is a flashing | waiting for an input?)
Comments
I would suggest looking at some of the other environments which have a text parser built-in like: Inform, ADRIFT, TADS, etc
Fair enough, that's probably the fault of the designer, but more often than not this is how I feel when I start to play them.
That's why I'm trying to do something a little different with mine, by having very short location descriptions and never using any possessive pronouns (I, you, he).
Parser-based games feel far more open to me. As a kid I used to love the thrill of discovering a command that did something to advance the game.
I was going to say that it won't be easy to create a game like Maniac Mansion or Shadowgate or whatever.
Twine was really meant to make Web-based Choose Your Own Adventure or Lone Wolf-style game books.
You could make Twine do anything, of course. You could write a side-scrolling Mario Bros. clone if you wanted. But that's not what it was designed to do.
You display some possible options on the screen, the reader clicks on one of the options which either results in more options being shown or executes the option(s) already chosen if they equal a known command.
eg, If the reader clicked on Read you could show a second set of options listing the items (if any) the reader knows about/is carrying that can be read. If the reader selects one of the items (say Dairy) then you would execute the Read Dairy command.
I was thinking of something more along the lines of using click and replace to build up the link text at the bottom of the page. This would go to a dispatch room which would work out where you went next. Probably more work than it's worth though.