If anyone wouldn't mind answer a few questions for me that would be great!

-What would your dream text adventure include?
-What wouldn't it include?
-What type of interface would you like to see?
-Which features would you like to have/remove?

Thanks for reading

• Short descriptions that only tell me what I need to know. In other words don't right a whole paragraph describing a forest (I already know what forests look like).
• 50/50 gambles with death. Fantasy elements. I don't so much mind a LotR type affair, but all this Twilight and 'races/species' with special powers leaves me cold.
• Very minimalistic. Dark with a light font. I know the compass, inventory and commonly used command buttons are handy, but unless you go to town on them with some clever CSS to make them less ugly I'd prefer they weren't there at all. And I have a real pet hate for the way the command box looks.
• Pass. Can't think of any. If you want something badly enough you could probably do it (within the program's capabilities) and at least visually you have complete and utter freedom to remove everything with CSS.

You know the joke: How long is a piece of string? As long as it needs to be. The answer to most of these questions is "it depends". Text adventures are very diverse; what you include, or not, is a function of your goals.

That said, lately I've been interested in unusual or hybrid interfaces, like the drag-and-drop of Texture or the button-driven gameplay of Versifier. (Also parser games with restricted command sets.) We have the art of writing interactive fiction largely figured out. Interaction, however, remains a largely unexplored territory. So that would be something to focus on.

a TES/Skyrim type of RPG implementation, just as a Text Adventure of course, as quest is a text adventure engine, lol.

felixp7:
(Also parser games with restricted command sets.) We have the art of writing interactive fiction largely figured out. Interaction, however, remains a largely unexplored territory. So that would be something to focus on.

I'm with you on this. The reason I'm building a Gamebook this time round (something I've always been reluctant to do) is because the prospect of not only creating a parser game with a whole new set of commands, but getting the players to adapt and understand it doesn't use the typical commands is just too daunting. I want to be able to accommodate EVERY conceivable command the player might type, but that's just not possible. Nothing frustrates me more in a TA than when I can't do something I know I should be able to, just because I'm not matching the wording exactly the way the designer did when they were making it. Until this is addressed there has to be something very special about the game to keep me playing beyond even the first room.

I want to be able to accommodate EVERY conceivable command the player might type, but that's just not possible.

No it's not, and you're not expected to. The parser is a little shared lie between author and player, whereas both parties pretend they can say anything they want to each other, while still playing a game with formal rules.

Nothing frustrates me more in a TA than when I can't do something I know I should be able to, just because I'm not matching the wording exactly the way the designer did when they were making it.

Well, that's a broken text adventure, one that hasn't been beta-tested enough. Such things have long been frowned upon in the community, and while eliminating guess-the-verb issues is a lot of hard work, when it succeeds parser games can work very well indeed.

My problem is that it takes a LOT of hard work, and even then the little shared lie can grow tiresome. Diversity is vital, and for too long we only had the same old parser, with CYOA taking off just in the past few years, and more interesting experiments just this summer. And it's amazing what people have been coming up with.