Too much stuff to do. I want to spend some time playing bass. I want to play some games. I want to do some gardening in the front yard. I want to do some painting. I want to write something. In the end, I’ve managed to only do a little gardening, a little bass playing, a bunch of game playing (finished Mass Effect and Half Life 2, in the midst of Forza 2 and Need for Speed: ProStreet – two remarkably similar driving games).

Bleah. So, instead, I’m writing this and watching some HD music performances on TV. Whee-ha. I have some vague ideas about this text adventure game idea. I think the basic core, just as a start, involves having control on the two analog sticks, and the triggers acting as “confirmation.”

On the left stick, you’d have short “responses” that would translate into more fully-formed responses. Very similar to Mass Effect. On the right stick, you’d have a physical disposition – stuff like “aggressive,” “shy,” and the like. How a person would respond to a line would be dictated by a combination of the content of the player’s response and their disposition.

The game would be simply a black screen with a small HUD at the base of the screen to deal with the sitck inputs. What the player would see on screen would be text that describes what is happening, dialog, and sound effects. So, perhaps if you were in a room, you’d have a short description of the room at the top of the screen. You might also have, for instance, a scraping sound on the door to the left of the room, which you would actually see as text, appearing on the left side of the screen, and animating in a way that mimics the sound.

The game itself would have nothing in the way of any other graphics or audio.

In terms of the story, one question is, “Does this format lend itself to a particular storyline?” Mechanically, I don’t know. I don’t know what kinds of descriptions of environment and what kinds of environmental interactions would feel natural. Clearly, this type of system has been used successfully for conversations in games like Brooktown and Mass Effect, so that’s an obvious fit. I wonder if you could do something like a frantic chase using only text and forcing the player to respond within a set time?

It might be interesting, if a variety of people were interested in doing some writing for it, to have the same story told from a couple different viewpoints – we’d set up the basic environment and plot, but the descriptions of the events for each character would be written from different viewpoints. Objectively, the events would be identical, but it’d be interesting to see if people make different decisions simply based on the perspective of the narrator? I suppose the obvious answer is, “Yes, duh,” but still… be interesting to see how that’d play out.