Text Adventures with a Mouse

Here are some screenshots of my point-and-click text adventure. These screenshots are only meant to demonstrate the user interface. The story is at a very rudimentary stage, so please don’t judge the game based on the fragments of text you can see here.

First of all, I will demonstrate a simple interaction between the player and an object in the game. We find ourselves in a room, and we can see a red book. Because we can interact with the red book, it is shown as a hyperlink:

We want to pick the red book up, so we click on the hyperlink. This opens a context menu:

We select the first option, and the book is moved into the inventory:

I’m hoping that this style of interaction will allow the story to flow without distractions:

• I’ve noticed that new players can be intimidated by a command prompt. They often don’t know the kinds of things they should be typing, and are reluctant to experiment. I suspect this may have become a bigger problem as command line interfaces have become less common in computing generally. These days, a casual computer user may never see a command prompt—except when playing interactive fiction.
• Games’ parsers are not perfect, and they cannot be perfect with the technology we have at present. This means that players often solve a puzzle, but then have to experiment, looking for a form of words that is acceptable to the parser. This experimentation is not part of the puzzle, so it is frustrating. It is also not part of the virtual world, so it tends to detract from the player’s sense of immersion in the game.
• Myst and similar games didn’t suffer from this problem, because all the interaction was done with the mouse. However, there was sometimes a related problem, where a player didn’t notice that a certain area of the screen could be clicked.

By interacting with the game using hyperlinks, you can see all the possibilities. You can therefore stay immersed in the game, trying to solve the puzzles rather than struggling with the user interface.

One disadvantage of my GUI is that certain types of puzzle can no longer be implemented. If a lamp’s context menu offered ‘Rub Lamp’ it would be a complete giveaway! However, as the graphical point-and-click games have shown, it is possible to implement good puzzles even when all the options are placed in front of the player.