Potential lessons found in the IF community...

[Goliath]

@copx
I thought about mentioning the roguelikes instead of IF, since they too have a dedicated magazine, a tighter knit community, and the 7DRL competition. But I decided that since roguelikes are often considered a type of RPG that comparing to IF would get the point across better.

You are absolutely right in that the appeal of IF and RLs is that one person can manage the entire effort. And with games like Dwarf Fortress incorporating strategy elements (and some of the most versatile terraforming in any game since, heck, Populous) RLs have certainly proven they are flexible enough to certainly handle an old-school RPG.

Ignoring JRPG (because, well, The Codex generally does), could you give some links to the prominent engines of those styles? Is the Ultima one Nazgul? How much beyond simple graphics do these systems offer? I'm hoping for some pretty extensive customizeability.

Ultima: http://myweb.cableone.net/gmcnutt/nazghul.html (yes, I meant nazgul)
Fallout: http://www.fifengine.de/
GoldBox: http://www.abandonia.com/games/en/858/F ... ntures.htm
http://uaf.sourceforge.net/

Those are the ones I meant. I have never actually used any of them, so I cannot answer your question. There are many more engines but most of them never reach a stable status. The problem is that few people care about them. As I have said, almost no one has all the required skills to make an RPG.

BTW, there is a rather obscure engine which originated from the roguelike scene called "T-Engine": http://www.t-o-m-e.net/main.php?tome_current=0
According to the development team it is mature and extremly flexible. It supports ASCII and top-down tile based graphics, and uses Lua scripting. That could be what you are looking for.

 

[BigWeather]

There was also, if I recall correctly, a construction set for Bard's Tale like games. And Adventure Construction Set waaaay back.

I'd looked into ToME some in the past (I think they even have a multi-player version), but yeah most of those engines are a bit too restrictive to what I'd love to see, or focus solely on the graphical end.

 

[mirrorshades]

I was discussing this with a friend earlier and he said "Why don't you write a set of libraries that implements D&D 1ed (or 3ed) rules that you could then port over existing modules / books as playable IF?" It's an intriguing idea. Though D&D 1ed or 3ed may be a bit much to start, a IF extension that say implemented the simple Fighting Fantasy book rules would be a nifty proof of concept. So many things I want to try, so little time. =(

You should check around on the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup... those would be the folks who would know what is already "out there". You would probably also need to pick one particular development platform (generally Inform or TADS) to start library development; somewhere I've got a link for a pretty hardcore TADS developer list... most of the stuff is way over the stuff that's over my head, but again, they would know what libraries are out there and what the language is capable of. (I've done more tinkering with TADS than Inform, so that's my perspective. I'm sure there are equally worthwhile Inform resources, since you said that was the one you were leaning towards.)

 

[Drain]

Are there any roguelike construction sets? A construction set would enable the folks with good writing skills(like Kingcomrade) to make a decent RPG without having to master a programming language.

 

[elander_]

You will always have to master a programming language of some sort. The problem is if you don't know what you want to do the construction set will not know that for you. And even if you have a vague idea of your adventure there are the limitations of the computer you have to learn to deal with. For example if your adventure plays in a small room, with people you can talk to, objects to interact with and places to move from/to theres a huge amount of possible interactions and reactions to an npc person actions that must be filtered out into only half a dozen of meaningful interactions. This is the hard part of creating an adventure for someone with low programming skills but it's unavoidable.

@BigWeather

Have a look at this:

http://institute.no.sapo.pt/q/quests.html

The language used by Daggerfall templated quests is a full programming language that can do anything that any IF interpreter can. What's missing is more possibilities to interact with the environment like Fallout had. On the other side Daggerfall has some very powerful Rogue capabilities to create quest templates and dynamically assign resources to those quests or add twitches and small modifications to those quests.

I agree that once you step from a pure textual description into an environment where object are iconified or even realistically represented by 3d models people expect that everything must be reporesented by an icon or 3d thing. This is one restriction that text doesn't have since we can describe a lot of things with text that are almost impossible to represent with icons or 3d objects.

 

[JarlFrank]

Are there any roguelike construction sets? A construction set would enable the folks with good writing skills(like Kingcomrade) to make a decent RPG without having to master a programming language.

Kingcomrade productions presents: Busty Whore and the Quest for the Goatse Crystal