How to make a text based game?

[Chien-ming Wang]

How is it done? Are there any tutorials?

[egswanso]

Yes. there are two major systems (Inform and TADS) and an active on-line community. Search for Interactive fiction

[Clay Dreslough]

Text-based Adventure games, like Zork? (These are what is referred to as Interactive Fiction).

Or text-based sports games?

For sports, you should start with a written design of what you want the game to do. Specifically, how does the player affect the success of his team? Then study the sport so that these interactions seem realistic.

After that, you could even build a board-game mockup if you don't have much programming experience. And then learn the programming steps piece-by-piece.

The first game I ever wrote was a dice-based baseball game, very basic but somewhat similar to Strat-O-Matic (although I was only five and had never played SOM or anything like it). From there I learned BASIC on the PC and started building more and more complicated games using more advanced tools.

Clay