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Picaro: Say Hello to Picaro

Picaro: Say Hello to Picaro

From the Picaro blog:

I’m really excited to tell you about our new project: Picaro.

Picaro is a way to make and play small adventure games. They play a bit like interactive fiction with the control scheme of an old Sierra/LucasArts adventure game. If that was gibberish: the games are completely text-driven, but require no text input. You don’t type “use the key on the door”, you tap “Use”, “Key”, “Door”, then you’re told in a few sentences what happened.

In a way, this is the worst of both worlds: the restrictive agency of mouse input and the limited expression of text output. But this is precisely why it’s exciting: clicks in, text out is the cheapest, simplest format for a narrative game

I’m really excited to be working on the infrastructure for Picaro. I love taking limited environments and exploring the boundaries and fringe cases of those environments, and we’ve already got mad scientists like Rob making us think of things that could be done that we hadn’t even considered. This will be a real “living project” as we try to keep Picaro easy and fun to play but offer the tools for authors to make new and exciting experiences, and I can’t wait to see where it goes!