[Completed] Thief: A Pokemon Text Adventure

Some of you might have seen my thread in the main game dev forum about pokemon-themed text adventures...so here's the pokemon-themed text adventure you were undoubtedly waiting for!




Game Introduction:
Like I already said, this game is a text adventure. It's in the original text-based style, where you type in commands like "> go north", "> unlock door", "catch pikachu", etc. It was written in Inform7, which can be found here if you're at all interested in making a text adventure of your own.

I'm built this game because I have a lot of fun building and playing text adventures, and also pokemon fangames. I've started two in the past (dracaena and pure heart), and finished neither, so this has been a fun change for me! Thief is a very tiny game (I doubt it'd take more than five minutes to play), which probably helped :) I hope you guys like it!


Game Information:
(plot spoilers incoming)
In Thief, you play as a renowned thief who is, at the time of the start of the game, breaking into a wealthy man's mansion to steal something valuable. But you're caught in the act, and hired to steal something for the dude instead. Your new quest is to break into the Charm Corps secret hideout, find the pokemon they stole from Rich Guy, and sneak out with it. Surely a master thief can manage that...right?


Characters:
You:
A master thief, or so you say. Nobody's really sure where you came from, or who you really are. All they know is if they want something stolen, they should hire you.

Rich Dude:
He's rich, and you like money. There's not much else to say.

Charm Corps:
A gang of inquisitive people who are chiefly interested in the secrets of Fairy-type pokemon. They steal as many as they can from as many people as they can, and then experiment on them in secret labs. Or so the gossip goes.


Features:

• Puzzles
• Catching, releasing and evolving pokemon (sort of! mostly useless in this game, but the mechanic is all there!)
• Your pokemon follows you around!
• Battles! (sort of)
• Did I mention puzzles?

Progress:
Game: 100%!
Testing: nobody is ever finished testing


Screenshot:


Credits:

• The people who wrote inform7
• Mark Tilford (automap extension)
• Emily Short (Glulx extension, Screen effects extension)
• Nintendo!
• dafont

Looks great :D. Looking forward to it.

Alright: nanowrimo is officially over (& I made it to the finish line!!), so I'm back on this project :)

updates: I decided to just call the thing "Thief", and made a new logo. I think it looks pretty snazzy, let me know what you guys think!

now back to making the rooms interesting, haha.

exciting news: I'm totally almost done with this! just working on a cover for the game, & then I'll upload it for you all to play :)

finally got around to uploading this! I hope you guys like it :) please let me know if there are any errors!

(the link to play is in the first post)

Funny, I'd been thinking of writing my own Pokémon IF not too long ago. Kudos to you for actually doing it.

It actually took me quite a bit longer to beat this than five minutes, mainly because I had an exciting time figuring out how to get the lime door open (use lime keycard on lime door? Dammit!) and in the process discovering that you hadn't loaded anything for the "curse" command, but hey. Overall it was a fun little adventure, albeit pretty railroad-y. I was also pretty bothered by the fact that you aren't allowed to rescue all the pokémon although you evidently end up with plenty of pokéballs with you. You did a nice job with the flavor text, though; the narrator has a great voice.

Are you planning on making something bigger, or was this just a one-off exercise you wanted to try?

you should write one too! it'd be really cool to see how different people approached diff. aspects of pokemon :)

is the lime keycard the one you have to kind of backtrack to get? I thought that might extend playtime a little lmao. & curse! what a great command! I'm totally going to have to write something up for that, haha. honestly the coolest part of other people playing your IF (imo) is seeing them try all the commands that hadn't even crossed your mind

I think you can rescue most? of the pokemon, at least the non-feral fairy pokemon. the feral ones....I didn't want to be responsible for the carnage that would follow XD & yeah, it's a total railroad of a game. idk, I have kind of a hard time making text adventures not totally linear, it's probably something I should work on!

when I wrote it, it was definitely just like "hey, might be fun to write a little pokemon text game!", and it totally was! and I thought about/implemented some more background stuff than actually ended up in the game, so making a larger game isn't totally out of the question.

I'm vaguely thinking of doing a straight pokemon fangame (like: new region, getting badges, etc) but then again....that might be kind of boring, to write and to play. I kind of want to find an idea that would work better with text than with graphics (or would work better with text & graphics. the last one I made had static location images so you got a better idea of where you were), sooooo I think I have a lot of brainstorming ahead of me, haha

anywayyyy sorry for the tl;dr reply, I'm super glad you enjoyed it!! writing IF is a lot of fun, especially adding all the little personal touches and descriptions, & I'm glad that all paid off

is the lime keycard the one you have to kind of backtrack to get? I thought that might extend playtime a little lmao.

Click to expand...

No, no, it's not... I had trouble with the command to get the door open, not actually finding the key. I tried pretty much every command except for "unlock" ("use keycard on door", "open door with keycard," "use keycard on keycard slot," etc.). I haven't played much IF, which is probably the only reason it was a problem for me.

I think you can rescue most? of the pokemon, at least the non-feral fairy pokemon.

Click to expand...

Hmm, do you have to do that in the window between getting the pokéballs and catching the ralts? Before getting the pokéballs the only messages I could get from the trapped pokémon was that I needed pokéballs, and afterwards I kept getting told that I could only have one pokémon at once and couldn't figure out how to ditch Ralts for a while to deal with the other ones.

Also, forgot to mention earlier: there's a typo in one of the room descriptions. I believe it's the one right after the non-feral cage room. Anyway, the room description says there are doors east and south, but the door is actually to the west. I would have been completely screwed if not for the mini-map showing that the actual doors are located west and south.

A good friend of mine wrote up quite a ramble about pokémon-based interactive fiction a couple years ago. As far as I know nothing actually came of it, but maybe you can get some inspiration by looking at her ideas.

oh hmm, ok. 'unlock' is one of those standard-type commands in the linked pdf, I think? but I could add some more commands for unlocking/using keycards. (esp "use", that makes a lot of sense with a keycard)

aha. you can do it as soon as you have the pokeball, but I think I only implemented "free X/rescue X" as commands for rescuing those dudes. but I'll change "catch X" for that situation, I can see why you'd use that command

& good catch! to be honest I mix up east and west all the time, so it's probably not so much a typo as me having gone "ah yes, definitely an east exit" lmao.

thanks for the link, I'll check it out! I basically live for fangames, I've got a couple under my belt and a ton on my to do pile

what are you supposed to do with the lemon keycard?

hint: there are three colourful keycards, and three colourful locked doors ;)

yeah...I've backtracked and gone round in circles and circles and I still can't find this fabled lemon door.
I've managed to miss something really obvious probably, but at least point out which room this lemon door is in?
please?

I had a look at the source, and the lemon door is right at the end. I realised the game only shows text if you don't already have the keycard (if you have the keycard, you just go straight from one room to the next), which is probably what's confusing you lmao. I added some text to show that it's been used, though :)

Haha, good to know I wasn't being incredibly dim. You planning on making more of these?
This was quite fun, confusion aside.

I'm not sure! I have like a million projects on the go at the moment that I should probably finish before I start anything new, haha. but I'd definitely love to make more interactive fiction, I find them heaps of fun to put together

....I can not for the life of me figure what command to type to open Lime Door.
'Edit: Nevermind figured it out..."

I played this, it was fun! I'm never any good at text adventures, but somehow I managed this one okay. Kinda wished I was able to free the second room of trapped Pokemon (I tried "unlock cage" with "lockpick set" but it wouldn't let me), but I guess there wasn't really an impact on the endgame.

If you wanted to make more pokemon-themed text games like this one, I'd totally play them! I think text adventure is a great medium that hasn't been properly used at all for pokemon fangames. You could do something really cool with it.

haha yeah, there are definitely some things I should clean up with regards to what commands it understands, esp. with the doors. maybe one day I'll even get around to doing it

I'm super glad you guys liked it though :)! text adventures are totally my jam, and making a pokemon one was a ton of fun. I'd definitely love to make some more (maybe a whole series of little episodes or something? then again, that would be ultra linear, and that's probably something I should be working on. HMM), but we'll see what happens haha

Is this like in a Choose Your Own Adventure book expect digital? Where it says,'Go to this page if you...'

Konekodemon said:

Is this like in a Choose Your Own Adventure book expect digital? Where it says,'Go to this page if you...'

Click to expand...

no, you type commands that progress the story, such as "look around" or "search chair"
though the game has specific things you have to do, and theres not much room for exploration for curiosity's sake

i've played some in the past, and this was the first i ever finished, and the map was helpful, but I felt really restricted