Picaro

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.

It’s so simple that games can be designed in a GUI, without touching a bit of code. This is one of the big aspects that gets me excited, and indeed the first bits I designed were concept pieces of a potential builder GUI.

We’re looking for more writers who are interested in helping us test the format and find the mistakes we’ve made and edges we’ve yet to discover. If this describes you, and you’re up for clawing through JSON, send us a note.