Anyone done this? I've been hunting around for tutorials and there's no shortage out there, but they all look very complex unless you know the language.

From scratch how? In a general-purpose programming language, without using an authoring system? Sure, it's been done, for various reasons. But to go that way, you have to know programming, by definition. There are no shortcuts. Or rather, authoring systems are the shortcut. That's their whole point.

For what it's worth, I once wrote a very simple text adventure engine called Jaiffa, with a two-word parser, in order to learn what goes into one. It's not meant for serious usage, but as the main source file isn't much bigger than a thousand lines of code, it should be easier to customize than more sophisticated solutions. And the Adventure Prompt system I'm working on these days has similar qualities.

I made a VERY simple game book style program I called Story Master...
(Picture Quest with NO bells and whistles...)
[ block name]
some text
any text
(B), Goto page, Button text...

No parser, just 10 choices predefined...
No programming understanding to know...
You just write your multi threaded story all the way to [Quit]
(or was it end)

But I agree with felixp7... If you want to do it from the ground up, you need to write 2 things at the same time...
Your story program, AND the story...
Quest already provides a very powerful (and confusing until you understand it) story program...
That leaves you with (mostly) just the story part.
and some programming to put it together...

Yes, when I said 'anyone' I was referring to forum members.

The tutorials for writing such games in Python, C++ and such claim to be for beginners, but they all look a bit daunting to me.

felix, I'll take a look at that code, see if makes any sense. Thanks.

DarkLizerd, what language did you use?

quest's code is much easier to learn than an actual programming language.... like python, c++, java, etc. The actual programming languages takes at least 1-2 school classes just to learn their basic scripting stuff, features/abilities, and etc usage. They are much larger, more complex, and more difficult, especially compared to the quest engine/GUI/Editor and its code.

To program (create) a game (or a game-making software/engine/kit, or whatever software), you got to already know how to use the tool (programming language and its engine/SDK/IDE).

I wrote my engines from scratch in JavaScript and I honestly wouldn't recommend it. But if you want to find my games and look at the source, you're welcome to.

No, it's not a venture I'll be taking on having now looked into it - I'd end up a raving lunatic.

erased :P

OurJud... I used Visual Basic 6.
I was my first attempt to create something similar to a script interpreter...
I would say mine is the only one that requires no programming experience...
It is quite literally, an electronic adventure book...
No inventory, no other things to try... nothing...

I have been programming in Basic, of one sort of the other since 1982 (ish)...

creating/destroying an Object in quest is easy... look into what you got to do in for example C++, look up: instantiation (Objects), classes, constructors, destructors, memory leaks, dangling pointers, shallow vs deep, pointers, memory addresses / addressing, Object Oriented Programming/Design (OOP/OOD), encapsulation, polymorphism, inheritance, assembly language and/or APIs (to communicate with your computer system and whatever else), activation records (functions/stack/free store/heap usage), and etc etc etc :D

Alex and co, really made an absolutely amazing game-making engine, so that you don't have to be a programmer, knowing all that stuff up above (if you wanted to make the quest engine, that and more, is what you need to know about, lol), or if you're a programmer, quest's coding is easy to learn and also it's made extremely easily moddable too, so you can go wild if a good programmer. Quest becomes more and more amazing as you learn/know more about actual programming, and how well Alex and co, designed quest.

if interested in the differences in designs/purposes/abilities of C++ vs Java:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Java_and_C%2B%2B (scroll down to near the bottom to the "Libraries' and 'Runtime' sections, as these are some of the main differences between C++ and Java)

if you don't know programming, do NOT use C++, as maybe you can potentially damage your computer... not sure if there's protections or not...

(bump)
If interested, I post a link to my Story Master (or the "clean" version Flow Master)
I created it for some one to use without needing to know ANY programming...

Post away, DarkLizerd.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/f2gwxkidipct2ie/StoryMaster_2.zip
The zip file contains 3 examples, (start with Example.txt )
And a list of commands... Simple tho they may be...
I last worked on this is February, so I had to re-learn what I was doing...
And clean it up a bit...
(The clean version is also called Story Master...)

Actually, after looking a Squiffy, mine would be a "copy" of that...
(I think Squiffy may be better)

Anyone that wants to start from scratch, not just mod Quest:

go download a copy of DIKUmud and dig through the code. That was all done from scratch. By a team. I doubt you want to really start from scratch, however. What most people do is get DIKU, or Circle, or MERC and modify the code - since it takes hundreds, if not thousands, of man hours to write a good text game from scratch.

http://help4assignment.co.uk Starters writing activity for kids generates fun creative writing prompts for students to use in writing stories of adventure.