What engine to use for a classic 80's style IF look?

[Der Tor]

I never finished some of my ren py games, because I am not an artist and it was always difficult for me to get or create good background art. In some cases I also felt that the artwork and the pretty pictures and the pretty interface kind of distracted from the message I wanted to get across which most of the time was very serious and somewhat gloomy.

Some of my favourite games are the text adventures and interactive fiction from the 80s without any art, like a mind forever voyaging.

Of course I don't want to create a typical adventure game where you have to collect items and open doors or go west or what not. I just want it to have that kind of minimalistic, entirely text and command-line based interface, which is difficult to do with ren py.

And I looked at some of the adventure games and interactive fiction engines, and most of them simply create HTML files to play in your browser and that's not what I want either, as looking at your browser the entire time would also detract from that 80s nostalgia that I'm trying to evoke.

So I'm gonna ask you guys, what engine would you recommend for something like that? And of course being easy to use and not requiring programming language would be a big plus.

[Imperf3kt]

Renpy can achieve that.

Theres also at least one example of thus in the cookbook, I think even two.
Updating the code is required though, as it dies work with modern renpy

[Der Tor]

I know Ren'Py can be made to look like that cause it can be made to look like almost anything - but it's definitely not the best suited for it, as it would be too complicated for me to modify it in that way.

I think I am just gonna use Twine after all. Didn't like it at first cause it puts out HTML when I wanted to have a game file that people can download, but it's just so easy to use.

Only thing is, the Twine Forum kinda sucks, cause it's not really a forum for collaboratively creating games like here.
So the question is, were can I post it as a Work in progress?

[Zelan]

You could still post it here as a Work In Progress. Any story-based game is eligible to be posted on LemmaSoft.