Comment by svachalek
16 hours ago
It's still pretty good. TADS is a more modern alternative, and the one I would go with, but basically these haven't been commercially viable products since the 80s so there's not a lot going into it.
Arguably, the right answer now is to document everything that matters to you about the adventure, and tell an LLM to run it.
I wonder if you could make a "choose-your-own-adventure" book uning LLMs.
It would write the book ahead of you, kind of like how railroads could send trains with supplies out to the track as it was built.
It does even better than that. I have a private interactive fiction game going based on a popular novel. It's very immersive. Still a work in progress. Right now you can do the daily life things the novel skips like making dinner. I make it so you can skip the day but I was enjoying doing the routine things. It's hard having the game keep track of objects and some NPCs knew things they shouldn't. I tightened it but testing is a lot of work. Hmm. Maybe I can have another LLM play test it.
It also allows you to deviate from the novel. This is a romance novel. I had the main character choose someone else and it showed an alternate version of the novel. After the main threat of the story was dispatched things settled into weeks of routine living where I added another person into my routine. I played to see if another event would show up but after 3 in game weeks I decided to stop. This was a test and I needed to improve the game. I can see this becoming addictive to some people because they will be living in the story and having a life there and making friends and finding partners.
This type of game is still uncharted territory. Does one end the game or let the player play indefinitely? Is it more fun to have the player do the daily life things or skip those or give them a choice?
Like with any LLM produced project, can you? Sure. Will it be engaging, well written or consistent? Almost certainly not.
You could, but no one wants to read or play GenAI content.
TADS is hardly modern. It’s actually the oldest VM based platform from the early 90’s.
Well, TADS is older than Inform, yes, but the whole idea of VM-based platforms for adventures originated from Infocom's Z-machine starting with Zork I in 1980 -- it's what let them basically release their games for every platform current in the US in the 1980s.
But not publicly available as a platform.