You know those old RPGs that were just text on a screen that used chance to figure out if you could kill the monster?
I've got free time and want something to help me brush up on basic factors of RPGs, so do any of you know how long it might take to make a more advanced version of such a game?

You know those old RPGs that were just text on a screen that used chance to figure out if you could kill the monster?
I've got free time and want something to help me brush up on basic factors of RPGs, so do any of you know how long it might take to make a more advanced version of such a game?

Games still do use chance to determine if you struck the monster; agility, evasion, dexterity, luck, and other stats are still in use. Now, we just added a greater visual element. There are still turn-based RPGs that have kept the same formula with some innovations - couldn't you call them "a more advanced version"?

You'll need to be more specific.

In Java you can have a fully working Text Adventure game up and running in 48 hours , however the question I ask is: what is your definition of "advanced" ?

Unfortunately I do not have enough information to answer your question.

I would assume you are after

1: Complex player and enemy stats ( GURPS )

2: Quest system

3: NPC states

4: Environmental impact on players and monsters

5: Procedurally generated world and dungeons

Sorry, I was having trouble putting what I had in mind into words. What I meant by more advanced was giving the player more things to do and people to talk to. Like, say, things to do for gold and experience besides killing monsters and doing quests. I want to give players more immersion into the game. I've played a few "text RPGs" (is there an actual name for this or is it just RPG?) and it felt more like a "choose your own adventure" story than a game.

Sorry, I was having trouble putting what I had in mind into words. What I meant by more advanced was giving the player more things to do and people to talk to. Like, say, things to do for gold and experience besides killing monsters and doing quests. I want to give players more immersion into the game. I've played a few "text RPGs" (is there an actual name for this or is it just RPG?) and it felt more like a "choose your own adventure" story than a game.

Yes, there have been many of them over the years. Those are the oldest of the RPG genre, often coinciding with physical-world RPG rule system invention, or testing grounds for rule sets.

You will need to either create large sets of rules for a world to be automatically generated or you will need to create a large amount of content yourself. A rule-based random world is going to be more replayable than a single hard-coded adventure book, but it is also much more work.

The games based on text-based graphics, with boxy rooms and letters for monsters, are called Roguelike games as Rogue was one of the oldest in the genre. NetHack is probably the most popular of these today, although many Roguelikes have very numerous followers.



One nice feature of these worlds is that designing them with multiplayer components is really not that difficult relative to making a single-player game of the same size. You don't need all the fancy graphics and animations and models and audio and mouse hit detection and all the other fancy features. A text-based view of the data can be very minimalist. Sharing the data between a small number of players is a natural next step.

The MUD and MUSH are the most common of them. A MUD is usually everybody running their own adventures mostly in parallel, a lot like how WoW has everybody running the same world, running the same pool of quests, but doing it on their own. A MUSH allows players to create rooms and levels based on rules they provide, and encourages more of the active role playing. Many popular MUSH servers are focused around groups of players who run their own D&D-style campaigns among themselves in the shared world, building up rules for sub-dungeons within the context of a larger shared world.

A good MUSH has lots of people to talk to. People have built up relationships, had virtual-marriages and intimacy, and even on occasion had real-world marriages result where they were online and had their virtual characters marry at the same time to share it with all their online friends. So there is that component, too.

I agree completely with the advice given. Depending on what you have in mind you can expect it to take at least two day if not longer. I've found sites that cover making a text rpg/adventure in Python, Java, and C++, but they are all just plain text. It becomes more complex if you end up wanting to use ASCII graphics or simple 2D static graphics to portray key events like finding treasure, death, pits, etc. or simply doing a static layout that shows the player's position through each room while showing text. As Shippou's list shows, each item can be as simple or complex as you want which again can also add to the amount of time it takes to make it.

Basically, to restate what the others have said, with any game, there is really no set time it will take to make a game.