Getting Interactive on my Web-Site

I’ve had a bit of an idea for an interactive bit on my OtherWhere website, and I’d appreciate any thoughts on how to proceed with this. Or indeed if you think the idea has any merit, and is worth proceeding with at all?

The idea was to make a blurb-text that was a bit more interesting than simply reading from some static web-pages. I was playing an old point-and-click style adventure game when I came upon the idea of implementing this type of thing over web-pages on my site. My initial idea was to use the format of old text-adventure games (now called Interactive-fiction) and the later point-and-click programs to form a relatively simple interactive way for people to brows my site and learn something about the OtherWhere and my characters in hopefully a more ‘fun’ environment.

I eventually intend to include some puzzle elements, probably through java if anyone is interested, to liven up some of the screens, as well as providing simple icon-based actions that are use in an ‘adventure game’ style to interact with objects placed within the game.

I’ve added a bit of a Beta version to the site just now. This doesn’t have any of the drag-and-drop functionality just now, although some example point-and-click stuff is implemented. The navigational system is functioning though, and the ‘random placement when wandering into the Nothing’ feature is implemented.

This version isn’t all that big, but if it seems worthwhile I can easily expand upon the locations, and maybe even give it a story of sorts.

I haven’t really seen anyone do this before. Then again that could be because it doesn’t really work or because it’s been tried and there was no interest!

I meant to put this test version up on my site some time ago but the free internet provider I used for testing stuff on-line had, in their wisdom, stopped FTP access to their free site. An unfortunate turn of events that left me with the option of finding another provider (but I couldn’t be bothered) or adding all the new files one-by-one through the web interface… so some time later I’ve now got all these files loaded!

It seems to run ok from my work connection, but I haven’t had a chance to test it from my slower home connection yet.

I’d appreciate it if you could spare a few minutes to have a look, and possibly leave some comments at the bottom of this post?

You can find the link from my OtherWhare site to this at: http://free.7host01.com/garryg/OtherWhere/intadv/   (Press the big grey button to start)