Howdy all. I’m brand new to Corona. I’m trying to switch over from GameSalad. I’ve just barely scratched the surface of Corona’s tutorials & examples and I’m wondering how easy it would be to create a text adventure in Corona. I haven’t found any examples of this yet.
I’d like to make something simple with just basic buttons like “Walk,” “Talk” and “Fight” for input. Can anyone point me in the right direction? [import]uid: 35706 topic_id: 6306 reply_id: 306306[/import]
A text adventure on mobile sounds awful. You’d have to type the commands on the tiny little keyboard.
Well, I guess it would be better on iPad. [import]uid: 12108 topic_id: 6306 reply_id: 21772[/import]
This was my first post on these forums. Thank you for alerting me to the level of helpfulness I can expect to receive. [import]uid: 35706 topic_id: 6306 reply_id: 21795[/import]
geez, you’re touchy.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?
You say you’ve barely started going through Corona’s documentation, so keep reading. There’s tons of information just waiting for you to read it. [import]uid: 12108 topic_id: 6306 reply_id: 21800[/import]
I think what you are going after is more of a point-and-click adventure and not so much a text adventure? If it is purely text where you must type all the commands, jhocking is correct. No one would play it because no one likes typing on an iphone. If it is a point and click that is a whole different ballgame and could definitely work well. I would go through the API’s and user submitted code. Lots of awesome work already done for you.
BTW I find the community here very helpful so far and I noticed that jhocking is usually one of the first to help. Just my observations. [import]uid: 31262 topic_id: 6306 reply_id: 21810[/import]
Not to hijack the tread or anything but i am also wondering about corona as a way to create a RPG for android, in the way of point and click, but SIMPLE at first since i am not a programmer, and i am starting out now. ( think text and simple button interface, no fancy animated graphics and turn based )
What i think he poster asked about is if corona is a easy language/system to create such a game, not if the game will be good or not, and i am kinda wondering the same myself because from the tutorials i have seen until now, creating a physics game (simple) is easy with corona, but how about a rpg game, would it be just as “easy” or is corona more suited for a different kind of games?
-Roar [import]uid: 34918 topic_id: 6306 reply_id: 21822[/import]
That is an interesting observation, that most of the tutorials seem geared towards physics games. Since Corona has Box2D built-in then it’s pretty trivial to put complex physics interactions into your game, so I imagine that’s why most tutorials go that route.
I suppose it’s not quite as easy to build a point-and-click adventure or RPG or something, but it’s still way easier to do in Corona than with some other toolkit. I mean, a point-and-click adventure is pretty much a mixture of action games and e-books, and both are done a lot in Corona. Corona provides simple commands for registering touch events, but the hard work is in building the complex inventory/puzzle system.
For what it’s worth, I’m not building an action game with physics and I’m definitely finding Corona way easier and more productive than writing it in Objective-C. [import]uid: 12108 topic_id: 6306 reply_id: 21826[/import]
I’ve been using Corona for 16 or 17 days now. My last programming was 30 years ago in Pascal for a college class. If you’re not a programmer, @voffel, but you understand some theory of programming (that things like loops, tables, and functions exist), you’ll still have A LOT of studying to do, but you’ll be surprised at how fast you pick it up. There are the sample apps that you’ve seen, and the APIs, and if you surf and search the forums you’ll find a lot of what you need.
I dove right in and started grabbing things from the sample apps, but soon realized I didn’t know enough of the Lua language to understand everything I was seeing, so when I wanted to customize I was breaking everything. So I backed up and searched the Web for Lua tutorials, read through a couple of those just to get the basics squared away with Lua. Now I’m able to take the samples and customize them and realize the types of components/functions/whatever that I need to add. I came up with my own workaround just last night for something I couldn’t find anywhere on the forums. (Moments like that make you go: teehee.) You still have to code, there’s no way around that yet, but if you’re dedicated, you can pick it up pretty quick.
And with an unlimited free trial of Corona (which I’m still using, but played a very rough version of my game on my Android just last night), you have plenty of time to figure things out before you ever have to worry about paying
For me (and I’m sure other non-programmers), the tough part is going to be figuring out how to refine the code I do come up with so that it’s efficient and not some duct-taped mess.
I personally would find an old-school text-based RPG kinda cool, especially if it taps into the nostalgia of those first ones that I played with friends all those years ago (assuming, of course, it is mostly point-n-click and not typing intensive).
Good luck and roll up your sleeves. [import]uid: 25480 topic_id: 6306 reply_id: 21836[/import]
@samsaturday, I loved text adventures in the day. To answer your original question, I don’t think the phone platform and/or Corona would have much of an effect on writing a text adventure, i.e. it wouldn’t be any easier/harder than writing one for a desktop or whatever. It would probably be the easiest of all games to write for phones. A scrolling text window, and a text input field (or buttons if you’re not a complete text purist 
) You could effectively write it for a desktop environment and then port it to Corona in a day. Of course, Corona is overkill for a text adventure IMO.
[import]uid: 23949 topic_id: 6306 reply_id: 22513[/import]
Actually Corona is the wrong tool to create a text adventure. Look at Inform7. there is also a runner for the iphone or ipad to run your adventure on. I would never create a textadventure with corona. [import]uid: 5712 topic_id: 6306 reply_id: 22528[/import]
Wow yeah Scott Adams adventures on the vic20/c64 I loved those!
But as said you want to keep keyboard input to a minimum and make it as easy to use as possible.
I’m learning corona as gjperch mentions, play around with the sample apps, it was frustrating at first where seemingly mintor changes broke the app but with perserverence I found this was happening less and less. I’m still learning Lua and find it hard as I’m used to compiling code which finds lots of silly errors like typos that you dont get with a scripting environment like Corona but it sure is productive!
Just keep at it [import]uid: 7334 topic_id: 6306 reply_id: 22532[/import]
