Huge archive that's heavily biased towards text adventures / interactive fiction. There are only three titles published by Lucasfilm Games, and they predate Monkey Island.
I always loved playing adventures from Level 9 Computing [1], particularly The Worm in Paradise. At that time, no solutions were available, so there was a lot of trial and error involved. I played on Spectrum, and I remember being amazed at their graphics engine that managed to present a full-screen (well, technically a half-screen) illustration for every location in the game. There definitely wasn't enough memory for that, so they probably have used some generative algorithm.
Looking at the Level 9 interpreter sources from https://github.com/DavidKinder/Level9 it looks like the pre-bitmap games stored their images as little bytecode programs (with instructions for move, draw, fill, etc, plus a gosub opcode so you could have "draw the same complex shape several times", opcodes for reflecting and scaling, etc) -- check the getinstruction() function in level9.c.
So likely hand-composed, not generative algorithm, I think.
For kids, I tend to skip IF and instead just make up role playing games with them. My kid will ask me to come up with like a my little pony themed adventure and she'll control two characters and I'll also control a character and play the DM. By being a character myself it adds some richness and allows me to give less obvious hints and push the story to a degree while still giving her room and autonomy. It works really well with kids ~5-7 so far, although it takes a bit out of me lol.
For IF, my kid has enjoyed doing some Zork with me, but the puzzles are pretty difficult.
My dad did this for my sister and I growing up and it was excellent.
We also played some text adventures, but I wouldn't recommend them for today's kids. Back then it was just cool to sit in front of a computer in the first place so bashing our heads against the wall for months trying to get a babel fish didn't seem as frustrating as it actually was.
VNs and Twine style IF would be less frustrating, although a lot of those are probably not age appropriate for younger kids.
That resonates with my experience, role playing with my 4 year old daughter was a blast. Playing a character while being DM is a very good idea to pass hints and have more fun, I did not thought about this.
> although it takes a bit out of me lol
So much this. Preparation took time, and the game itself consumed a lot of my time and mental energy. Sadly, this came to a point were my daughter was highly motivated to play, but I was often not in the mood for that or had enough time to play, so our sessions became less and less frequent, to disappear entirely. I think it's been more than one year we did not play (she is 7 now).
Nevertheless it was a great experience. All fathers should consider give it a try. For the record, I never really played this kind of game before, just witnessed some.
We probably played more than 30 games. Toward the end it followed the same template where she was a witch (a gentle witch of course) that went from towns to towns to solve issues (generally related to magic). Most often she had to learn a new incantation along the way to help her in this adventure. Sometimes she also had to use previously learned incantations written on her notebook. That was a bit a trick on my part to get her read a bit. Drawing a basic plan of the city helped a bit, so toward the end we did that a lot.
In one year or so, his brother will be old enough to play, so I might try again. Something that would help is pre-made campaigns (just in case someone knows some nice resources for that). As I am thinking about this, I guess generative IA can be leveraged for this purpose.
I'd recommend Chuk and the Arena [0], it's IF but link based rather than parser based (twine), and imo suitable for kids. I played it with my own kids and they liked it. Had to help them a bit with some of the more obscure puzzles, but overall it's fairly easy. Play it yourself before making up your mind though. It's free on the IF archive and itch.io. Personally I enjoyed it very much.
And thanks for the Sorcery recommendation, I haven't played it myself and from reading about it in the past I wasn't sure if it's age appropriate.
Some of these games are available via the Interactive Fiction Archive; it has many interactive fiction (text adventure) games:
https://www.ifarchive.org/
Whoa--some of these games feature SLAG hints [1] which is a Perl script I wrote a zillion years ago to produce .z5 runnable Invisiclues files. I had no idea anyone had ever seen or used it. What a fun way to start a Sunday!
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 50.1 ms ] thread[1] https://www.solutionarchive.com/list/company%2C4/
So likely hand-composed, not generative algorithm, I think.
My one child loves playing the Sorcery[1] series with me- I read out loud and they make the choices.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcery!_(video_game)
For IF, my kid has enjoyed doing some Zork with me, but the puzzles are pretty difficult.
We also played some text adventures, but I wouldn't recommend them for today's kids. Back then it was just cool to sit in front of a computer in the first place so bashing our heads against the wall for months trying to get a babel fish didn't seem as frustrating as it actually was.
VNs and Twine style IF would be less frustrating, although a lot of those are probably not age appropriate for younger kids.
> although it takes a bit out of me lol
So much this. Preparation took time, and the game itself consumed a lot of my time and mental energy. Sadly, this came to a point were my daughter was highly motivated to play, but I was often not in the mood for that or had enough time to play, so our sessions became less and less frequent, to disappear entirely. I think it's been more than one year we did not play (she is 7 now).
Nevertheless it was a great experience. All fathers should consider give it a try. For the record, I never really played this kind of game before, just witnessed some.
We probably played more than 30 games. Toward the end it followed the same template where she was a witch (a gentle witch of course) that went from towns to towns to solve issues (generally related to magic). Most often she had to learn a new incantation along the way to help her in this adventure. Sometimes she also had to use previously learned incantations written on her notebook. That was a bit a trick on my part to get her read a bit. Drawing a basic plan of the city helped a bit, so toward the end we did that a lot.
In one year or so, his brother will be old enough to play, so I might try again. Something that would help is pre-made campaigns (just in case someone knows some nice resources for that). As I am thinking about this, I guess generative IA can be leveraged for this purpose.
And thanks for the Sorcery recommendation, I haven't played it myself and from reading about it in the past I wasn't sure if it's age appropriate.
[0] https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=2fa5imp327k84ox
It's a modern interactive fiction game:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Pig
[1] https://www.solutionarchive.com/game/id%2C615/Zork+I%3A+The+...
I'm pretty sure I've seen this auto-mapping software some years ago. Can anybody point me in the right direction?
Edit: it’s not in this list: https://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/mapping-tools/