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Welcome to the LetsChat(Public) wiki!

LetsChat is a text message game platform designed to play a different kind of text adventure. While the platform will eventually be versatile enough to play most styles of text adventure games, it is intended to play more real-time, ARG-ish, conversational games, via text messages on the players phone.

Key factors defining the games I'm primarily aiming for:

• The game is already installed on every cellphone in existence.
• The ubiquity of text messaging means that someone could easily choose to play any time, even in the middle of a business meeting.
• The game should be played in real-time, which means that the character "on the other end of the line" may “sleep” for eight hours, or may only get back after boarding a train that is scheduled to depart at 10am tomorrow in some other time zone.
• Additionally, real-time pacing means that the player may not respond immediately. This may or may not have dramatic impact on the outcome of game, as it might in real life.
• I anticipate sparse interactions with possibly a flurry of messages back and forth followed by a gap before the next flurry.
• I think the game should strive to use as much natural language as possible, although the abbreviated form of the medium and clever crafting would drive the user toward “predictable” responses.
• Unlike classic games in which you play someone else for a while, since the game is in your life, not the other way around, you are you, maybe just a little better or a little worse.

Project Status:

Much of the practical messaging infrastructure is in place and currently the development emphasis is on initial concept testing and game development process questions. This wiki is in its infancy, but I hope to use it as a place to develop the approaches and documentation for this project.

Technology:

The basic infrastructure is developed as a stand-alone C# .Net program that services requests. At the moment messages are sent and received via email to cellular carriers' text message or multimedia messaging gateways so that they are text messages for the user. Since the messages are all "buffered" by email servers, there is no need for a forward facing server or even 100% up-time for that matter as the messages are polled (currently) from the mailboxes, processed, and responses are returned. Since each interaction is relatively discrete a single "server" program can be simultaneously running a variety of players in a variety of games. At the moment the player spaces are all discrete so that even if two players are playing the same game, they are fully independent of each other. (Multiplayer maybe latter.) The program persists each player's game state after each interaction. Primary language parsing is handled by an add in bot library Syn.Bot. Syn.Bot can derive its "instructions" from either C# code or SIML. I have developed a few (and plan many more) extensions to SIML to adapt it to game development. Currently game authoring is in this extended SIML, but it is likely that a pre-processor may be appropriate at some point.