Animated Narrative - Week 12 - Text-Based Adventure Game

By Atul Shakya

For our final week in Animated Narratives, I decided to make a text-based adventure game from the idea that I worked through in week 11. This is a hide-and-seek game where you play as the seeker and go around the house looking for your friend, who can be hiding anywhere. The player in the game can interact with the surroundings and use things found around the house to complete the objective.

This game examines the idea of telling a simple story through the environment. I used the simple game of hide-and-seek and tried to make it interesting, immersive, and challenging by allowing the player to interact with the things in the environment, find their way through interactions, and let them built their own story. This wouldn’t be possible if this were a linear animation piece.

I got the idea to make a text-based adventure game when watching the TEDx talk given by Emilie Tappoloet, where she talks about choose-your-own-adventure games that she used to play when she was a kid. She mentioned in her talk that she thought those games had bad stories but the adventures and exploration through the illustrations were immersive and amazing. This line made me go back to Ian Bogost’s article ‘Video Games Are Better Without Stories’, where he talks about environmental storytelling.

Both of these works gave me an idea of creating an interactive piece that had a straightforward story but could be made interesting and immersive through adventure and exploration of the environment. And I believe my text-based adventure game does just that. A hide-and-seek game where you use the environment to find the other person.

Below are some snapshots of the game. I have also attached the HTML file with this post.

Downloads:

Download File: hide-n-seek.zip