When I sat down to write this blog post, trusting that my brain is usually good at coming up with words, I was confronted with utter silence. Absolute nothingness. Why is this, you may ask? Well, during my time working on our capstone project yesterday – a text-based adventure game – I spent a significant amount of time implementing the Room class to be used for representing rooms and their contents in our game. And, since Rooms require a short description and a long description, when writing the tests for the Room class, I had to come up with these descriptions. A lot of descriptions. And I may have had too much fun. I would like to share a few of my favorites:
Room Name: “Kitchen”
Short Description: “The floor and the walls are full of potatoes. How this happened is a mystery.”
Long Description: “With the sparkling clean appliances and empty shelves, one would almost believe that this kitchen had never been touched…if it were not for the potatoes. The entire floor is covered in potatoes. And, if one looks closely enough, a hole in the wall reveals that the walls, too, are full of potatoes. How this could have happened is a mystery.”
Room Name: “Chair Hell”
Short Description: “The chairs are staring at you. You feel a sense of dread.”
Long Description: “You are not entirely certain what you did to deserve this – perhaps you were a bit too critical of your office chairs in life – but in this afterlife, you seem to be surrounded by chairs. And not just any chairs – sentient, angry chairs. They look at you with clear malice in their eyes. You wonder if it’s too late to repent.”
Room Name: “Sewing Room”
Short Description: “Fabric is spilling out of the shelves while a mouse is hard at work sewing a button on a sleeve.”
Long Description: “The way the mouse on a nearby table scrutinizes your outfit makes you feel underdressed. Other than the overflowing fabric in the nearby shelves, most of the floor space is taken up by mannequins of various shapes and sizes. About a dozen mice are hard at work doing various repairs, from missing buttons to rips in seams. You wonder who these clothes are for.”
Writing the descriptions was a fun exercise in creative writing – and who knows, perhaps we will use one of these in our final game? And the tests served their purpose as well, all verifications of the currently implemented methods passing on the first try (always satisfying). I even got to use unittest’s Mock class to mock the unfinished Item and Door classes – something I learned about in CS 362 (Software Engineering II) but never had the chance to try. Overall, it was a gratifying exercise, even if my mind is currently out of creativity.
For now, I will make myself a cup of tea and allow my mind some rest until I tackle our project’s Item class – and come up with all of the names and descriptions for those. (Sure, I could use some classic lorem ipsum, but where is the fun in that?)
