In ancient times, many games were created without any graphics at all. Yes, it's true. (Way back then, radio was only in black and white...) Most of these old games were so-called text adventures. You explore a bit, you find items, you solve a puzzle. Your reward for solving a puzzle is a story segment and admittance to a new area. The cycle repeats. The great benefit of using text is it's way faster and easier to create than graphics. You can show the destruction of an entire solar system in one paragraph! Crowds of hundreds of people are just keystrokes away! Some role playing games were made the same way, although graphics were often used for maps. There might also be a still picture of each type of monster. An example of this type of game is "Wasteland", which was later the inspiration for the classic graphical CRPG Fallout. CRPGs of this type featured exploration, combat, social interaction with NPCs, and strong story elements. Combat in these games was turn-based and handled by menus, just as it is in modern turn-based console CRPGs. Your character's turn comes up, you select an action, and instead of a canned animation playing, text is displayed. So here's what I suggest. Your main exploration display is a simple, flat, top-down map. Create it any way you like. Your player character is represented by a non-animated cursor. NPCs and monsters are non-animated markers. Below the map is a scrolling text box for messages from NPCs and monsters, descriptions of towns, dungeons and treasure, and so on. When a fight breaks out, the main exploration display is replaced by a tabular text display showing your party and the monsters. Below it is a combat menu just like in Final Fantasy. Select an attack or other action from the menu. In the scrolling text box, you see, e.g., Cloud Strife: Buster Sword vs. Genova-Birth Genova-Birth-10 HP Genova-Birth looks near defeat! AerithCasts Healing Wind on party Cloud Strife+100 HP Aerith+100 HP Yuffie+100 HP As you can see, this is not very graphics intensive. All you really need graphics for are the maps, and a bare minimum of artistic skill is needed to create them. Taking a page from the Rogue-likes, the maps could even be ASCII! When characters talk, it would be nice to show a portrait of the character, but this is a nice to have, not a must have. I like to call this a Text-CRPG, even though it's not all text. You can put in as much or as little story or characterization as you like. You could have as little story as Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior III, or as much as Final Fantasy VII. (And in your game, you could revive Aerith with a Phoenix Down!) Your game could be as linear as Xenosaga, or as open-ended as Baldur's Gate II. Once you free yourself of the tyranny of graphics, the world is yours! You could even create a Text-CRPG of this kind as a web site, and do all the programming in ECMAscript, nee JavaScript. Fun! Back to Table of Contents -- Game! # 4 To Game! List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by George Phillies. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com