I just had some fun playing through a text adventure game called Choice of the Dragon (try it!).
It was created with a system called Choicescript. Choicescript games are free to play on the web, but are also available as iPhone and Android apps. There’s (so far) one more game called Choice of Broadsides.
In a lot of ways these resemble what I’ve done with Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual – in fact the basic differences are owed to the two facts that I’m simultaneously developing for the web and for print, and I’m illustrating my story nodes. As it stands the Choicescript games don’t support illustrations but it wouldn’t take much custom Javascript (and/or php) in the page template to fix that. Choicescript allows you to set variables depending on the player’s actions and one of those variables could easily be the URL of an illustration. A little document.write, and you’re there.
If you’re interested in playing with Choicescript – some user-created games get hosted on the choiceofgames site – you can start out with the blog.
[tags]text adventure, game engine, choice of games, choice of the dragon, choice of broadsides, roll your own[/tags]
There’s another “Choose Your Own Path” adventure game being developed that you might be interested in. They’re setting it up so people can write up their own stories and sell them (or give them away for free) on the in-game store.
http://www.boundlessstories.com/authors/