I've never played much in the way of Text adventures, in a way I suppose they were before my time. I came into gaming at the high point of graphical adventure games, or the beginning of their descent depending on how you look at it.
There does seem to be a fairly active online community for them, people brought up on Multi-User dungeons, Zork and that hitch hikers guide to the Galaxy game. One thing that surprises me is that lack of user tools however.
First a bit of education, there are two major ways of developing a text adventure. The first is Inform 7 an english based programming language and TADS3 a Java like language. One thing these both lack however is an online interpreter, which makes them all but completely useless to the casual gamer like myself.
Behold, prometheus, a work in progress by yours truly. It's only had two days of work so far but it's been interesting so far. I can certainly see the potential of the medium but there's a reason I've never really got into one before.
Learning all of those stupid commands, typing north north north etc. Boring. And the amazing things about Inform 7 (The only one I've tried) is that it doesn't have any system for conversation trees. What the hell?
So Prometheus will be a text based system for making text-based adventure games, not an interactive novel.
