Well, on to the more important things. I made a primitive game engine to test my story. You can check it out here: Clickity. It runs on Javascript, so you'll have to enable that to make it work. It also doesn't work in Opera for some reason. Probably it can't read XML-documents through Javascript (nor could I make it understand XSLT stylesheets. Bloody Opera! Good CSS support though). It works in IE, but looks like shit (you're supposed to ignore non-breaking spaces in xhtml, you bastard browser). There was something more... Oh yeah! It's text-based
It's not complete. You can't collect all stones yet (just six or something), and you only really meet, like four people or something. Plus, there are really just a few things that influence the overall story, but at least you can go (almost) anywhere you want to. You won't be able to go further than Mt. Sutaim though, and don't bother clicking when you get the option "To Dark Mansion". I know you want to, but it's a dead-end, for now. It's a very rough representation of what the story's going to be like in the actual game. But I think it's a fun way of checking what works and what doesn't (story-wise), which will make it easier to program the actual game later on.
So, what do you think? Does something about the story seem unusually weird?
Or if you feel that you want make your own text-based adventure, you can download all the files (story.xml, js_funcs.js, story.xsl (not necessary, but helpful), story.php/story.html and style.css), read the docs and start writing away. If you're good, you can probably implement a battle system too... And maybe an enemy definition file, and different types of areas where you'll meet different types of enemies... *starts having ideas*
