Implement a 2D/Text based Adventure/RPG in Unity

I'm confused where to start with, as I love C#, I want to use Unity, but I want to build a 2D or Text based RPG with Adventure elements within Unity. People have suggested starting with combat, yet I don't really know how to make text games in Unity. Any tips or tricks on designing one?

 

Fit the tools to the game, not the other way around. For a text game, maybe Inform or Twine is a better fit than Unity.

There are some good RPG and adventure game frameworks for Unity. Adventure Creator and ORK Framework come to mind. There's also a visual novel toolkit. If you have the Dialogue System, there's a free Choose-Your-Own-Adventure framework add-on on the extras page.

Assuming you stick with Unity for the sake of this discussion, can you flesh out the design a bit more?

 

While @TonyLi and I usually agree on most things, I'll respectfully differ in this case. Unity is a great tool for making text adventures, even if that is a quite unusual use for it.

A couple weeks ago, I started porting a text adventure I wrote as a kid in Applesoft BASIC to Unity. I got distracted by something shiny and put it down, but if I ever do finish it, it'll be my longest-development project ever. However, Unity was working fine for it, as far as I got.

So: is the difficulty that you don't know how to make a text-based UI in Unity? Or you don't know how to represent and manipulate the data that represents the game world under the hood? Or both? (And actually, neither of those is a game design question... those are implementation questions, and so really belong in the Scripting forum.)

 

I may use Tidy Text Adventures or ORK. The other option is make a prototype that I'll have to write myself. I'm still going with Unity, but I figured I'd make the combat system turn-based with a hexagon grid. It would seem simple enough but I feel dumb that I can't find a regular hexagon plane or shape. I tried making a circle with 6 sides in Blender to meet this need but it's never regular. After I get the hrid up and running I'll work on some basic abilities for the player and the enemies. I really like the combat in Battle Brothers, so I plan on improving their style.

 

Also, where is the implementation sub-forum, or what is it called? This isn't sarcasm, if this thread truely doesn't belong here I'd like to know where for future reference.

 

The Scripting forum is here. It's appropriate for most "how do I" questions... this forum is more for "what should I" type questions (i.e., discussion about the design of a game itself, quite apart from how you would go about implementing it).

 

Driving a Lamborghini to the end of the driveway to get my mail from the mailbox would work fine, too. Might just be a bit of overkill.

With questions like world building, you're in the right place. So what's the essential experience? What do you want the player to feel? Randomly/procedurally-generated worlds (e.g., roguelikes) provide a different experience than linear, scripted games (e.g., Telltale stories).

 

Making a text game with unity is like using a crane to lift your cell phone off of your desk.

 

Sorry for necro.

Is it still not recommended to make a text with pictures adventure RPG using the newer unity and assets?

When I ask on other forums, people say you should learn coding and use unity, then when I search on this board here says it's overkill.

 

You might want to look at a visual novel tutorial. These are mostly text based with a few sprites. Fungus is free on the app store and is a visual novel creator.

Another thing might be a visual novel tutorial like this:
http://www.indiana.edu/~gamedev/2015/09/27/creating-a-visual-novel-in-unity/

It's a little old and I had to make a few debugs when I went through it, but it works.
Unity is well suited for a 2d text and graphic game.

The thing with Unity is you can basically do any type of game, so what you learn can be re-used for the next game no matter what type. You can also export to almost anything.

 

I'd argue that Unity is still useful for if you're looking to support multiple platforms.