The Haunted Night
Type: Text Adventure Game
Genre: Horror
Release Date: September 7, 2011
Introduction:
The Haunted Night is my first small game project using the C# programming language. To learn about game development, I decided to start from the most basic way that a game can be made, which is as a text based adventure game.
Text based adventure games are similar to how "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure" books work. You are presented with a narrative, which hopefully stirs the imagination of the player, and then you are presented with choices depending on the situation of the story. There are times when you have to actually type out actions, such as "Get Key" to get the key to a door, but other times you can simply type in the letter of the choice you want, such as "A" for "A. Get Key".
Most text adventure games, like Zork, made by Infocom in 1979, have a scoring system, while penalties or even death are placed upon the player whenever they pick the wrong action.
The reason why I chose to create a text based adventure game first is because even though it is the simplest of games to make, it still requires careful planning, testing, story writing, and sometimes even adding or removing features. These are the same things that every game, from simple 2D Pong style to 3D Batman Arkham City types, will have to go through. Since the aim is to practice these processes, use creativity to cancel out the lack of graphics and animation, and review certain ways of thinking in terms of game development, the text based type of game is the perfect choice.
