Tidy Text Adventures: Editor tool for creating text-based adventure games

Hello Friends,

We've just completed and released our newest tool: "Tidy Text Adventures" - an editor extension for building text-based adventure games (think Zork, Humbug etc) with zero coding requirement (of course, you're free to extend it as much as you like).

Tool:Tidy Text Adventures
Price:USD$25
Asset Store:https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/5981
Documentation:Tools Documentation Site

Features:
-No coding required, just type-and-click-and-press-play.
-Scheduled backup system integrated into the tool. Sleep a little more soundly.
-Multiple keywords for every action / item / room. Results in a nice, organic language feel
-Full working example adventure included (The Quest to make me my Morning Coffee).
-Full source included - people seem to love that.

Enjoy!

I got a huge kick out of creating the tool. Hopefully a few people get a huge kick out of using it.

-JFFM

 

This bring some nice memorys into my mind

I just saw the video and think i will buy it some times but i also have some suggestions and questions.

1. It would be great if i can use different languages for the same game so i can at first make the game in german and then translate it to english and other languages. This way i can deliver the game to my customers one time and the player choose his language that he likes best.

2. It would be good if i can use some textures above my text so that i can show i.e. some kind of asci art to the players or give them some hints inside a picture for what he also can search/look for or what he can use ....

Will this run on the ipad now or in an update?
If so is there or will you support the keyboard from the ipad?
If this will work smoothe on the ipad and the two features above will be included i will buy in a second

 

Could not resist and just bought it
Hope for future updates that make it work on ipad and let use textures.

But for that price i have to play with it and have fun.

 

Hi @RandAlThor,

Will this work on iPad?

Definitely - actually you should be able to build the example project direct to your iPad / iPhone / Android and it will work with the keyboard, etc.

Multi-language support

Oh man, that's a very interesting point. I'll have to meditate on it. The funny thing is - I designed the tool itself to be easy to localise (you'll notice all of the help, titles, button labels etc. come from a text file) but I didn't think of it so much for the game itself. I'll put my designing hat on!

Including textures for rooms / items

I can definitely do that. I'm actually aiming to do this for all elements and evolve the tool into a "Visual Novel" styled tool.

Thanks for the feedback!

-JFFM

 

Pretty cool tool. I have always been a fan of MUDs so it is great to see this. I might have to pick it up to tinker with for fun someday.

-Dane

 

It starts on the Ipad 3 but the text is realy smal and i can not get the keyboard to appear.

 

Hi @RandAlThor,

Strange! The UI elements themselves are just the default Unity GUI elements - which should prompt the keyboard to appear. I'll do some investigation and see what the dealio is.

Ah - the text size would definitely be small, I realised this last night - all of the UI is styled from a single GUISkin (you can find it in the project) so feel free to tweak as much as you like, you can up the text size, change the fonts and colors etc - anything you like.

Does everybody dig the demo font? I was psyched to find it - I swear it was almost exactly the same font from the old Sierra games (Space Quest, Police Quest).

-JFFM

 

Hi @Dane,

Man, I was a huge fan of MUDs too. I was actually thinking (while I was making the tool) how great it would be to get one of these text-based, MUD-styled games for mobile. Something with the same chatting and socialisation you would get in the olden days.

Google App Engine + Unity - I think it can be done!

(So many ideas in the world, so little time to do them all)

-JFFM

 

I know what you mean about having to many ideas. I have been working on some networking code for my game and when I had chat and account creation finished, I was really tempted. I thought about making a full blown MUD with some 3D art mixed in to give some visuals.

Back when dialup came out I had jumped on several MUDs. Then Simutronics releases some killer games and Aol went unlimited. I sunk many hours into those games...

-Dane

 

Maybe you could include the free "ngui" asset in this and then i/we can use the "platform resizer" asset too and so it could be a solution for multiresolutions and different aspect ratios?

Or how do you think this can be used to make a game for different resolutions?

 

Hi @RandAlThor,

Oh good question. I'll have to put my thinking cap on for this one.

I've designed the way the output works to be fully modifiable - so do feel free to plug it into whichever GUI system takes your fancy (all of the source is included and documented for this). The tool just passes the GUI (TTA_UI.cs I think) a list of strings with a type (e.g: "Look") and you can style it however you like on a code-level.

I'll take a look at NGUI's platform resizer - I wasn't actually aware they had a platform resizer asset, very interesting!

-JFFM

 

@JFFM

The platform resizer is from someone else but is working with ngui or without.

 

awesome! Thats what I need.

Question. Would it be possible to make that the text does not appear at once, more like letter for letter, or word by word like on old pc's and with a little beep for each letter (seen Wargames Movie?).

 

Hi @Devision4,

Man - you've touched on my absolute favourite thing. We use that 'text-printing' Pokemon-style effect for every game we make.

That's definitely possible. At present the system (see TTA_UI.cs) returns a collection of responses after the user types say: "Look".

It looks like:

"You are in the garden. It is wonderful", TTA_Response.Look,
"To the north you see the manor", TTA_Response.Direction

And so forth - and just iterates through them and throws them up in the GUI.

So instead, we could return the response and increment a master ticker during Update() to decide which letter we are currently up to, and just print up until that point.

I'll pop it in as a tick-box in the next update. I like your style!

-JFFM

 

Such tick-box option would be awesome. Sadly iam more a designer than a programmer. Could you implement a way to include a sound effect aswell to the typewriter effect?

 

It looks fantastic mate, It's an awesome tool for writers and starters interested in creating an interactive story without the need of diving into programming and game development.

I'll make sure to recommend it to those!

(Hell, I'm even tempted to create a TBA myself, just for the sake of it!)

Good luck with this!

 

I can definitely do that - stay tuned!

-JFFM

 

Hi Everybody,

I've been looking at German character support (at the recommendation of @RandAlThor) with Tidy Text Adventures - and the conclusions are:

1) The save format and tool itself supports these characters out-of-the-box (so go out there and get your Umlaut on!)
2) The font that comes with the Example project does not support these characters, however - so they will appear as other characters.
3) The default font that comes with Unity (Arial) does support these characters, so if you navigate to the GUISkin (ExampleSkin) you can change the Custom Styles fonts to Arial and you will be able to see these characters.
4) All of the styling is handled by this GUISkin - so if you need these characters and are feeling more fancy than Arial - grab yourself a font that contains these characters and set it as your font in ExampleSkin (we use Urban Fonts for free fonts)

I hope that helps!

-JFFM

 

Thanks @EvansGreen!

I'm hoping people get a kick out of the tool. It's a strange, liberating feeling to work on a purely text-based, discrete time-step game after working with 3D graphics and animation and real-time gameplay.

-JFFM

 

shame that i need to upgrade to 4.0 as said from the asset store

 

Joshua, thank you so much! One more request

Could you implement a way to insert a Titlepicture to the Game?

 

Hi @runner,

It definitely is! I began development of the tool before I became fully versed in the whole "3.5-to-4.0-and-visa-versa" issue.

However, you can do what I do - and download the free version of Unity 4.0 and install it to a different location so you can have both 3.5 and 4.0 on your machine - it seems to be fine with that.

In the meantime, I'll keep everybody posted if I can create a 3.5-friendly version of the tool. The tool itself doesn't use any special 4.0 features, it was just developed in 4.0 so moving it back to 3.5 is a nightmare.

-JFFM

 

I can definitely do that!

-JFFM

 

Awesome. Now I will wait desperate for the update

 

Any news about an update?

 

I love what you did with TTA. I'm just curious how hard it would be for you to add some sort of event system as well as preprocessing tags in the descriptions. As an example for events something tied to actions would be ideal so that when a player picks up an item or enters a room the game could perform another action or even just give an altered description of the action (preferably with a random chance to fire setting). As for the preprocessing, it would be really useful to be able to make a block of text in a room description only appear if you have a specific item in the players inventory or based on earlier actions of the player. I don't have much free time and only a general working knowledge of C# based on my experience with C++ as well as plenty of other languages but I'll be steadily working on implementing those features for myself but all the while I'll be hoping you beat me to it so I can get back to working on my story.

 

Again, any news about an update?
Hope dor the features we are talking about on the first site of the thread.

 

bump

 

JFFM, I am sure you are very busy. But I think I may have found a bugs I am hoping you or someone can respond to.

1) When playing the game on a web-build and you type your instruction, the [RETURN / ENTER] button does not submit your instructions. It requires the player to grab the mouse and click the [Go] button on the screen. This is frustrating to player. Can you please tell me how to edit the code to fix this?

Thanks!
jim

 

One more bug report. (And I sent you an email in regard to this one.)

IF you create an item and place it in a room.
AND IF you check the box to allow the item to be picked up
AND IF you leave the box unchecked for the item to be seen.
THEN the item can be picked up BUT it is not added to inventory and is not usable with the use case game logic.

I am hoping you can respond fairly quickly on how to fix this in the script. THANKS!

 

And i am still interested in an update but it is quiet around JFFM here in the forum after i bought his things

 

Rand, do you have any ideas about how to fix the fact the [RETURN] button does not function on a web-build of the game.

 

Two things for certain:
1) There are bugs that have to be fixed to make this usable.
2) No support from the developer in regard to request for help.

Don't waste your money. I wish I could get mine back.

 

I've been playing around with various tools for text based games, such as Inform 7, and TWINE, and I've been thinking that it'd be great if there was something like those for Unity, which would allow for extendability by the user (adding in other features, like graphics, multiplatform support, etc).

So it's awesome to hear about this one! But a bit sad to hear that the author has perhaps moved on to other things (understandable!), and progress on it is perhaps no longer being made?

It looks promising. I'd really like to check it out, and if it was FREE, I definitely would. But being a poor old indie, I can't justify the $25 currently.

Maybe you should drop the price to $5, or make it free, if you have no further plans to work on it? And people can play with it as a cuioso?

All the best, either way!

 

well ... broken promises all over this place. I will think twice before I ever purchase a asset again...

 

I'm planning on picking it up in next few days. If development is no longer planned, opening a member only github project or something would be nice...and we can continue developing it for you. I've spent hours looking on the asset store for something that could be used as an solid organizational back bone to a conversational AI and this seems to be the best and reasonably priced. Only thing better I've seen is StoryBricks but they seem to be going a super high end exclusive route. I'd much rather team up with a few devs in a closed svn group and hammer something similar out using this already fantastic base. Cheers.

 

I just purchased the asset and it didn't download. The only option given was "Open in Unity". This produces a directory search box showing no asset folder for it.

I'm not seeing any option to just "download" it.

PLEASE tell me this isn't abandonware. : (

 

when will the updates with pics and audio be available?

 

hello, i've never made a game before and have a very simple newbie question maybe someone can help me with... I making a tidy text game and want to try it out and trouble shoot, and I cant for the life of me figure out how to play my own game!
any guidance would be awesome.
thanks

 

@Sinperium Assuming your purchase went through, you need to open unity. Choose Window then Asset Store from within Unity. Navigate to Tidy again and you can download it from there.

@the lvd I assume you bought this asset? Find the scene file and double click it and hit play.

 

Hi there. I did buy it and the "import" option did not display. I decided to give it one more try here and tonite it displayed and I was able to download the asset.

 

Yes…you will see "open in Unity" when you are in the web browser version of the asset store. After downloading it…you will then have to import it…then find the scene file and click play. I assume you got this far.

 

Hello dev, any plans for the promised updates in 2013?

 

Looks interesting, but no responses from the dev since early 2013? I guess that means no guaranteed compatibility with Unity 4.6 or 5? It's a shame the term "ababdonware" has to exist, but I see it more and more often these days. Especially with the inflation of being able to play unfinished games with no guarantees of their ever being completed. Developers can cash people's money and move on to new projects without ever finishing anything. Oh well.

 

Yes, and its even more customer wise unfair that the asset store don't remove ababdonware. There is no money refund. This perfect way to scam people actually.

 

Hey JFFM, Have you been able to implement any updates for your TTA? I'm found this thread and I must agree these would be nice ideas! Is there any chance you could get back to us on them? Thank you!

 

I e-mailed and tweeted the developer this morning and he acknowledged via twitter that he would read the email request. So maybe we can have an update. This is what I had sent:

Good morning,

I wanted to say thank you first of all for making such an amazing product. I love it! It brings me back to a lot of good times. Now, the project seems abandoned and I really wanted some necessary help to make this work for me and my team. Quite frankly, I Will be asking for some minor and some harder features as well. I promote this tool to other developers as this is the second license I bought now(I lost my login info for my other accounts so I lost a few assets and Unity cant seem to help me). I know about 6 developers who would purchase the tool at an even greater cost if we can just have these features implemented. Your text adventure is the only one that is used on Unity and offers easy portability for that reason. So, I ask that you please assist with this.

The two most important features for me are the following:

*Save game feature - There is no way to save a game. If I made a game now, it would have to be short and completed in one sitting. Otherwise the player would lose everything.
*Room images. I would love this feature and would many. Please, can we just add at least these two features? Otherwise our $25 that we spent would mean very little.

But aside from those two, if you can take the time to implement these other features as well, it would be great!

1) Items as characters with their own inventory room. This way we can also perform character switches in game and use multiple characters we can be.
2) Enter character name so we can customize the character that is the player character.
3) Can we have conditions on the Use case? EG: If character has item, then perform. Or if Flag is set to yes, then perform?
4) Instead of using a switch rooms to change our room descriptions, can we have a function that will alter the description as well?
5) May we also have character properties? Maybe just a few such as character money, health, experience, points, status, mood, etc... So we can refer to them in our commands or our descriptions by using a variable such as &&PlayerCharacter.Health&& or by calling a character by name: &&Character.JoeSchmoe.Health&&
6) If room images are integrated, can we have it integrated in the form of an image manager so that we can set the room image, but also change it easily rather than using a switch room?

Please, I beg you to consider implementing this. I do not not know C# myself and this would be of great assistance. Otherwise I will need to hire someone and pay them to make these changes and that will cost me about $1000. Please at least respond if you will not be implementing any of these features. Thank you for your time and your tool.

 

Hi there, I would like to buy TTA but have a question.

Is there already a way to define a call to a custom function(+parameter) on completion of an action?

If not, this would basically cover most of your feature requests as people could then
use an action to say, replace an image, play a sound, autosave. This could reside in a separate functions tab to flow with your neatly packed design. Would you be willing to implement this feature to end all feature requests?

I need to know that I can make these kinds of changes before I purchase it, which leads me to my final question.
If you cannot add this functionality, would you be willing to honour a refund if I download this and am not happy with it?

 

nah he does nothing with this asset. if you cant implement it yourself, I wont buy it.
Version is totally outdated... 1.0.1.2 (Jan 03, 2013)

 

Ahw. I read and read... and the closer I got to the bottom..blah. Update this shizz...