How do I make a text-based game?

As others have said Twine is a good first shout for doing a text based game. It has a lot of built in tools that support that. Though HTML and jscript can be tricky for the more advanced features that you’ve mentioned you’d like to incorporate into the game. Not impossible - but if you don’t come from a coding/programming background its pretty tricky to wrap your head round from what I’ve seen.

An alternative option would be to use Ren’Py. I’ve found python (on which renpy is built) is much easier to wrap my head around the code for. You can pretty easily have sound effects with lines like play sound “audio/sfx/bellyrub.mp3”. Whilst it is primarily used for visual novels - you can use it to create games that are purely text based - see Tramp for a great example of this. If you’re not familiar with renpy games the default text box is a small-ish one along the bottom of the screen - but you can adjust the size of that default text box to fill the screen to make it appear like a more traditional pure-text game. Its also relatively easy to change the fonts and text styles.

And whilst Sugarcube Twine does provide a save option, renpy has greater integrated support for this. Its also pretty good at handling player choice menus for branching narrative.

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