tinychoice and flowchart.fun Published 12/4/21
I've been using Tinychoice a lot recently.
I'ts easy to just crank out a quick text adventure to share with my friends. Tinychoice is a game engine that uses simple syntax (easier to understand than Markdown) to write small interactive fiction. It's basically text-based Flickgame, and I love it.
(Unfortunately, there isn't any documentation for it, but it's easy to figure out with a few exports.)
But then I came across flowchart.fun a few weeks ago, and I got an idea.
What if we combine them?
Using these two in conjunction with each other, you could make a text adventure with a game map / walkthrough. So here's a quick tutorial / example.
First, I'd set the flowchart style to breadthfirst, so it branches out like a tree, but you could do whatever you like. Here's what I made:
After working on it a bit, the Tinychoice game looks like this:
This snippet of game:
=START=
You are trapped in a room with Bob.
Talk to Bob -> bob
Would translate to this image, or this snippet of flowchart.fun code:
Start
talk to bob: Learn about ladder
So with that template, you could expand upon it and create a printable game guide. Although, now that I think about it, it might not be that practical for long games.
What about physical copies of Tinychoice games?
We can make printable game maps, and the game itself can run on a webpage, no problem. The file sizes are no larger than 100KB, and that's if you're making a giant game. But, from that, how could you produce physical copies? You could get a bunch of cheap 1MB USB drives, and use those. But if anyone else has ideas, feel free to message me.
And if for some reason you wanted to play the bob room game, you can play it here.