smcamerons-python-adventure VS RenPy

I don't know if this counts, but I wrote a parser for "the ship's computer" in my game, "Space Nerds in Space". It's described here: https://scaryreasoner.wordpress.com/2016/05/14/speech-recogn...

I also wrote some toy "interactive fiction" things (with less sophisticated parsers) in python and Lua as a way to gain familiarity with those languages, not that they are very interesting in and of themselves, though they demonstrate a fairly standard technique behind these kinds of games in a compact way.

https://github.com/smcameron/smcamerons-python-adventure

https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space/blob/maste...

Here's a trivial text adventure in python I made when I was starting to learn python: https://github.com/smcameron/smcamerons-python-adventure

The point though is to start with a very simple, well known, text only type of game, like interactive fiction or a "text adventure", or whatever they call Zork like games nowadays, which in its simplest incarnation is (or at least can be) pretty simple (i.e, mine is about 400 lines of Lua), but can be made arbitrarily more complex by adding new types of objects, object interactions, verbs, and sentence syntax that it can understand. It will give you a good feel for how to organize a Lua program, how to deal with data structures ("tables" in Lua), etc. It's simple enough, and being text only, you don't get caught up in details of the problem that don't actually have much to do with the language itself, but complex enough that you have to think a bit. I find it a good problem for new languages (I did the same thing when learning python.)

Ren'Py - Visual Novel Engine. Python, Cython, C

Here are 2 interactive story game engines: * https://www.renpy.org/ * https://twinery.org/

###################################################### Credits label credits(): $ credits_speed = 20 scene black show text '''{b}Blabla:{/b}\n\n{i}Me{/i}\n\n\n {b}Clacla:{/b}\n\n{i}You{/i}\n\n\n {b}Dladla:{/b}\n\n {i}He{/i}\n\n\n {b}Hlahla:{/b}\n\n{i}She{/i}\n\n\n {b}Brrr:{/b}\n\n{i}Grrr{/i}\n\n\n {b}Drrr:{/b}\n\n{i}Hrrr{/i}\n\n\n\n\n Made with {a=https://www.renpy.org/}Ren'Py{/a} v[renpy.version_only]\n\n\n{b}Ren'Py License:{/b}\n[renpy.license!t]''' at Move((0.5, 1.0), (0.5, -1.0), credits_speed, xanchor=0.5, yanchor=0) with Pause(credits_speed+4) return init screen about(): tag menu add "main_menu" use game_menu(_("Credits"), scroll="viewport"): style_prefix "about" fixed: xalign 0.5 yalign 0.5 viewport id "vp": draggable True mousewheel True has vbox: spacing 3 textbutton _("whattheheeeeellll") action Jump("credits") init -1 style about_label is gui_label init -1 style about_label_text is label_text init -1 style about_text is gui_text init -1 style about_label_text: size gui.label_text_size

You can also check https://www.renpy.org/

I can't speak for in-game stuff, but I encourage anyone who wants to to try making a visual novel! It's way easier than you'd think it is. The only tools I really used were Ren'Py (the engine), CSP and Paint.net (for the art), and KKT (for the models).

If you want full creative control, I would suggest going your own way and making indie games. The visual novel engine, Ren'py, is free to use and fairly easy to learn. They have a lot of helpful resources including Lemmasoft Forums, which is a great place to ask questions and find talent such as artists (we found our sprite/CG artist, BG artist, and GUI artist here, along with one of our voice actors).

Make your text game, but not "within ChatGPT". Instead, make a game. You could use Ren'Py or really anything.