Grad student’s thesis, Text Quest, headed to Steam
Chris Ingerson, game developer
Chris Ingerson, graduate student, creator of “Text Quest”
My name is Chris, I am a video game developer. I do basically everything under the Sun, except for audio, and I love to play games, and I love to make games. I am a grad student, this is my second year of grad school for The Media School, so “Text Quest” is part of my thesis actually. So “Text Quest” is a first-person text-based adventure where everything in the world is literally made of text that represents it. So grass is the word grass repeating on the ground, trees are the word tree, giant spiders are the word giant spiders and my personal favorite is invisible walls just because they actually have to say invisible wall.
The video shows him playing his game on a computer.
And it’s inspired by old school text games like “Zork” or “King’s Quest,” so you actually will interact with things, so to open doors, you type open door, to read a note, you’ll type read note and basically everything will respond to what the player actually puts in there. I grew up with Nintendo games, so I’m a firm believer in intuitive mechanics are the best way to approach things, but at the same time, I’m working with text-based adventures, which are pretty much by definition the least intuitive genre there is.
More examples of words you can type in his game, such as “pipe,” “sewer” and “hall.”
Because, in theory, you can do anything, so I have to make it intuitive enough where you’re playing this game where you can do whatever you want, but you still should know in the back of your mind what you what you do to solve this puzzle or what you say to open this door or what you say to unlock this chest, and that’s kind of the challenge that I personally like.
The end of the video shows the opening screen of the game, “Text Quest.”
Produced by Sara L. Wise
Designing a video game from scratch usually requires a team of experienced programmers, designers and artists for a playable product to ever materialize.
Chris Ingerson, a graduate student studying game design, is developing Text Quest almost entirely on his own. The game will release early next year through the Steam Greenlight program, which publishes independently created games on the Internet’s largest digital game distributor.
“Text quest is part of my thesis, actually,” Ingerson said of the 3-D text-based adventure game where every object is represented by a word.
For example, a key is represented by the word “key.” A lantern is represented by the word “lantern.” Players interact with the world by typing commands. To open a door, the player just has to move the character to a door and type “open.”
“You can actually type ‘examine,’” Ingerson said. “You can type ‘pick up,’ you can type ‘slap with fish,’ and, assuming you have a fish, you’ll slap something with the fish.”
Most contemporary games feature developed graphics and interactions based on inputs from a controller or mouse. Ingerson decided to take a different route after collaborating with members of Hoosier Games, the student video game design organization at Indiana University.
“There was always a joke in Hoosier Games,” Ingerson said, “that we have really talented artists, we have really talented programmers, talented designers, but our only problem is we never have enough artists to keep up with the art demands.”
The game’s lack of an art style has ironically become the game’s most defining artistic attribute. Because every object is represented by the word for what it is, the game world gets creative in how it depicts the player’s surroundings. In a tunnel, for example, the walls will be made up of hundreds of uses of the word “wall” lined back-to-back.
“You don’t get a clear picture of it, but when you see it, you go ‘oh, that makes so much sense,'” Ingerson said.
Ingerson submitted Text Quest to Steam Greenlight over the summer. The Greenlight program lets members of the Steam online community preview games, discuss them and vote on whether they should be published on the platform.
Ingerson said he received a lot of feedback, although reactions were mixed.
“The percentage of ‘yes’ versus ‘no’ votes was very discouraging from what you would expect,” Ingerson said. “Text Quest had about 40 percent ‘yes’ and 60 percent ‘no.’”
Positive comments lauded the game as interesting, but negative comments questioned the art style.
“Which was a hard thing to respond to,” Ingerson said. “It’s hard to sort of explain that to people, because the game is not a graphical powerhouse.”
The game was greenlit despite the voices of critics, who said that the graphics and gameplay mechanics are too simplistic. Ingerson is working to finish Text Quest so it can be published on the platform next year.
Ingerson started studying game design as a graduate student. He earned his bachelor’s degree in telecommunications in 2014, then etched out his own master’s program. Over the past year and a half, he’s been learning new ways to go about programming, which can sometimes slow down production.
“Development has been geared towards what I learned at the time and what I want to learn in the future,” Ingerson said. “I look at old code and say ‘there are ten thousand ways I can make this better now.’”
“I have to judge if it’s worth it to make it better, or if I want to stick with what I have to help speed development along,” he added.
Ingerson said he’s trying to keep players in mind. If a player types “slap with fish,” or any other command, Ingerson wants the game to give a response of some kind.
“You have to anticipate anything that the player could want to do,” Ingerson said, “because if you do anticipate that, and they do that thing, and you have a really unique response for it, people really love that.”
Ingerson’s work is also academic. While he’s developing Text Quest, he works with game design program director Ted Castronova, who is also Ingerson’s advisor. Ingerson has to explain as part of his thesis why Text Quest is important as an example of game design.
“It’s a sort of academic greenlight,” Castronova said.
Castronova said Ingerson has to prove his game is important to the study of game design and the video game industry, but he said he thinks Ingerson is working on something that deserves more attention.
“Gamers, sort of like herds of antelope, will graze in one area and move onto something else,” Castronova said. “He’s working on something that was grazed on 15 years ago.”
Although text-based role-playing games are a relic of video game history nearly two decades ago, Castronova said he thinks Ingerson is onto something.
“People at the top of this industry are saying this genre is not dead,” Castronova said.
Indie game developers are more drawn to produce games with lower graphics because they’re generally less difficult to make. The open-world building game Minecraft is widely successful with millions of copies sold despite its lack of advanced graphics. Ingerosn’s idea also is unique in that it combines text based adventures with a 3D world.
Ingerson has some advice for would-be game developers considering following in his footsteps.
“Fail faster,” Ingerson said. “You’re going to be bad when you start out. The first game you make is going to be bad. The second game you make is going to be bad.”
“The third game you make is probably going to be bad,” he added. “And you’ll notice as you go on, you’ll get faster and better, and your technique will improve.”
Ingerson said students considering game design should get started now, because practice and revising are the only ways to get better.
“You got to get on the ground floor,” Ingerson said. “You got to start running with it.”