Over the course of the past week, I and a few others in my capstone course were chosen to create a text-based adventure game as our final project! As this was my number one pick, I am very excited and have already started exploring the wide variety of ways we could go about planning and creating our project. This exploration led me a few different places and I learned about some technologies and libraries I was unaware of in the process. To share a couple:
- I discovered a cool JavaScript library called jQuery Terminal Emulator for emulating a terminal-like UI in the browser with custom commands.
- I learned about creating JSON-RPC services and multiple ways not to integrate one with a Python/Flask application.
And to get some inspiration, I played through a few of my older works of interactive fiction. One game in particular I played through is a demo that I wrote some time ago for a game called The Marble Mansion – and it is the perfect candidate to recreate using the jQuery Terminal Emulator plugin.
The Marble Mansion Demo is the first act for a game I originally made using Inform7, an application for creating interactive fiction. The player wakes up in a decrepit mansion with no memory of how they got there, and the only way to find out (and escape) is to explore the mansion. The game is interacted with by typing commands such as “examine item” or “look at room”. It is a fun game even if it is just a demo (feel free to play it) and the current version works fine, but I would love to recreate it from scratch in order to truly customize the experience (and challenge myself). And after my discoveries, I think I will choose to use JavaScript with the terminal plugin I found in order to rebuild the game in my free time.
Overall, exploring these technologies and my old games was a great exercise in order to get in the correct mindset for planning our capstone project. I already have a lot of ideas for the structure we could follow as well as a few ideas for what the story could be – and I cannot wait to get started!
