Project Summary

Design and develop a platform for creating and playing text-based adventure games, AKA interactive fiction, as described for Adventure, the first such game of its kind. In order to fully understand the concept, as well as the endless possibilities, you should first study the history of the early interactive fiction games, as well as locate an implementation that you can play, to familiarize yourself with the genre.

The game is based upon a player traversing a “map”: a collection of locations (rooms), the connections between those rooms, and the commands to move between rooms. As the player traverses the map, they collect treasures, and are confronted with a number of problems they must solve in order to continue to make progress in the game. The goal is to traverse as much of the map as possible, collecting as much treasure as possible, removing the treasure to a safe location, and surviving the adventure, while scoring as many points as possible.

You can go here to play the game on-line (or download it). Click the “Play Online” button in the upper right corner. To get started with the game, enter the building, take everything, exit the building, go south (or s) 3 times, and then unlock grate with the keys, open grate, and go down to enter the cave thriugh the open grate.

Now you are in the cave and can explore from there. Have fun… :-)

Basic Requirements

There must be an established dictionary and vocabulary - the words and phrases that the game engine comprehends. These fall into the general categories of:

Direction and movement commands: north, south, up, down, etc.
Action commands: take, throw, light, drop, run, jump, crawl, etc.
Status queries: inventory, look, location, score, health, time, etc.
Questions: queries that the game and user can ask
Responses: replies that the user and game can give
Nouns: collection of objects of the game - actors, treasure, weapons, objects
Descriptions: room, object, and action descriptions

You will need to create a game “engine” - the functionality that executes the moves and actions that the user enters. In addition that game engine will need to keep track of score, health, inventory, object locations, rooms that the player has visited, and the locations and movements of any of the other active agents (NPCs - non-player characters: animals, monsters, etc) that exist in the game. There may be other functionality that the game engine will need.

There must be an inventory of objects that can be distributed throughout the rooms in the map. Items consist of tools, weapons, materials, treasures, commodities, machines, etc. Objects can generally be mamipulated by the user, taken into the user’s posession, and/or moved between rooms, but some objects may also be stationary.

There must be multiple actors and agents: the player(s), various creatures and monsters, and benign and/or benevolent characters. It is possible for the actors and agents to move about the map on their own. There can be conflict between various actors - sometimes facilitated by objects that the player has, or objects that are contained within a certain room.

There must be logic that requires that certain conditions exist for the player to take certain actions - they must have a lamp to see in the dark - but they must light it first, and thus might need an ignition source. They must have fresh batteries in order to use a headlamp or flashlight, they must have a canteen to carry water to drink while traversing the map.

There must be multi-step problems and riddles for the user to solve in order to make progress at certain points in the game.

There should also be a method for saving and restoring the game state, and keeping track of the highest scores.

The database for the program will consist of all of the above.

You MUST create your map, plot, and narrative - you cannot copy another text-based adventure game. You should initialize all of the above lists from text-based CSV files that will initially hold your data. You will use those CSV files to initialize/recreate your database, and to edit/extend your game. See the end of this description for a suggested approach for the CSV file structure. The contents of the CSV files are delimited by pipe (‘|’) characters.

You are NOT allowed to create a grid-based map of rooms - you must use a node-based map that can have any number of inter-connections with other rooms based on links to those rooms.

User Interface

Finally, in addition to the console that accepts keyboard input and displays the text of the game, the game should have a user interface that allows the user to see their score, their health, their current posessions, the treasures they have gathered, the creatures they have “dispatched”, etc.

You must also maintain the overall dialog of each game - and display the running dialog for the user. This means that you will have to provide a scrolling interface that always shows the latest input/response at the bottom of the scrolling text field.

The user should be able to pause the game at any time (which saves the entire state of the game) and return to it at a later time.

Stretch Goals

For the truly motivated, here are some stretch goals:

Have the game be able to produce a graphical map for the player of all the locations that they have visited - while excluding those locations that they have not yet encountered.
Add functionality for a multi-player game - where more than one player can be active in the same game at one time. You will also need to take into account possible interactions between the players.
Add pictures and graphics for the various agents, actors, rooms, and objects of the game.

Extensible Features - The project should not only allow the user to play an established “default” game, it should also allow the user to extend that game by adding:

Locations (rooms) to the games’s “map”
Actors (creatures, monsters, benign and/or benevolent agents)
Objects (treasure, tools, weapons, commodities)
Commands (movement, action, queries, replies, status)
Problems, puzzles, predicaments (sequences of commands and events that lead to conditional progress, or setbacks)
Scoring metrics associated with the above

Extend the user interface to facilitate creating/extending the game, as above. In fact, this could be the means by which you can create your initial game for testing and playing purposes:

Creating and connecting new rooms to the map
Adding new actions
Adding new creatures
Adding new objects
Adding new problems
Assigning point values for the above
Editing the existing components

Example CSV File Structure:

Rooms Table CSV File Structure

Each room has links to other rooms that can be reached by the associated move. This table is esaily extensible to any number of acceptable moves for any room, and any number of rooms.

ID  room name              move    ID  move   ID   move   ID   move   ID

1 | Small cave entrance  | south | 2 | west  | 3 | up    | 4 | down | 5
2 | Small cave north     | north | 1 | down  | 1
3 | Small cave south     | north | 2 | east  | 1 | west  | 5
4 | 
5 |

Room Descriptions Table CSV File Structure

Each room has a long description, which gives a verbose response when that room is reached, and a short description when that room is reached subsequent times.

ID  Long Description                                        Short Description

1 | You are standing outside the entrance to a small cave | Outside small cave entrance
2 | You are at the north end of the small cave            | North end of small cave
3 | You are at the south end of the small cave            | South end of small cave

Example Game Play Based On Above: (1,2) = room #’s; (s,n,e) = move abbreviations

Game: You are standing outside the entrance to a small cave (1)
Player: south (s)
Game: You are at the north end of the small cave (2)
Player: north (n)
Game: Outside small cave entrance (1)
Player: south (s)
Game: North end of small cave (2)
Player: east (e)
Game: There is no where to go in that direction (2)

Dialog Question Choices CSV File Structure

Question1 and Question2 accept two possible actions (1st action ID, 2nd action ID), and their respective response ID’s, which can be the next question ID, or a Terminal ID, which ends the sequence of questions

ID  Text     # of Responses  Response 1   Response 2

1 | Question1     | 2 |      1st action ID | 1st response ID | 2nd action ID | 2nd response ID
2 | Question2     | 2 |      1st action ID | 1st response ID | 2nd action ID | 2nd response ID
3 | Terminal3
4 | Terminal4