Best and/or easiest engine or way to make text adventure games.

[Azimuffin]

So I've got a bunch of ideas for games, and I'm thinking it would be good to start with what would very likely be the easiest of my ideas, which is a text adventure game. (I can work on my other stupid ideas that would require learning unity and blender once I've successfully made something simple.)

I have a lot of ideas for the plot, and how I want the game to play but I know nothing about actually making games or what is the best thing to use for games like this.

The main point of my game is going to be that there are a lot of choices, a lot of endings and a lot of dead/bad ends. Because of that, to avoid players getting frustrated and having to restart, I would want something where I can implement a rollback system. Something like an arrow to just hop back through previous scenes to make a different choice and keep going.

The other main thing I want is something where I can have a sort of map of all the different scenes and paths, so that if people wanted to get everything, then they would be able to actively see where they have been and what they have done. Maybe clicking on points that have branching paths so that they can take another route.

I know this is a lot to ask, but I really want to start getting some of my ideas out of my head, and this one just occupies way too much space.

Any and all help is greatly appreciated, thank you all very much.

 

[Nagozo]

A classic engine choice for this kind of game is

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. You can get started with minimal technical knowledge and use most features out of the box if you choose a story format like

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.
Without any customisation you'll get a 'standard HTML game' look (you know the one, all grey with the menu on the left), which already comes with the navigation arrows and saving/loading. You could make a scene map fairly easily too, depending on how fancy you want it.

The Twine editor will give you a visual overview of your story. You could start by making a prototype/outline of your game, just to get a feel for it, and expand upon that once you're getting familiar with the process.

There's a lot of learning resources online, so I suggest going wild on Google whenever you need to figure something out. There's also some clever and experienced people on here, so it pays to check out other threads or just ask your questions if you run into trouble.

Good luck with the project!