35+ years as a developer, IT engineer, architect, manager, in industry and academia. Programmed everything from PDP-11s to Cray, from C to Python and everything in between.
By this time there certainly should be some good engines! Adventure (the original) is at least 42 years old. I know there were versions where I say the original comments with dates from 1975!
From this Quora article there seem to be some free-ish engines:
If you look at the original text based game engines (Adventure, Zork, etc) they were all basically finite-state-automata engines, with each room location as a node, and the moves as graph edges from room (node) to room. Usually there was room-specific code attached to each node for the possible actions within the room.
I built a similar engine in college many, many years ago. It's quite do-able with early college undergraduate programming skills. Sadly, that code is lost in the mists of time. On the other hand, its probably better that way :-)
So it depends, really.
Do you want to make a game, or do you want to learn to make a simple game engine? Either way, it will be fun, and you'll learn a lot!
Quest and Squiffy look like they might be what you're looking for.
By this time there certainly should be some good engines! Adventure (the original) is at least 42 years old. I know there were versions where I say the original comments with dates from 1975!
From this Quora article there seem to be some free-ish engines:
quora.com/Im-searching-for-a-good-...
If you look at the original text based game engines (Adventure, Zork, etc) they were all basically finite-state-automata engines, with each room location as a node, and the moves as graph edges from room (node) to room. Usually there was room-specific code attached to each node for the possible actions within the room.
I built a similar engine in college many, many years ago. It's quite do-able with early college undergraduate programming skills. Sadly, that code is lost in the mists of time. On the other hand, its probably better that way :-)
So it depends, really.
Do you want to make a game, or do you want to learn to make a simple game engine? Either way, it will be fun, and you'll learn a lot!
Quest and Squiffy look like they might be what you're looking for.
textadventures.co.uk/quest