Month: May 2022

For the Love of Reading

For this week, I’d like to take a detour from the usual tech-centered posts and talk about storytelling in another form: books. Much of my free time away from working on my team’s project has been spent reading books. In fact, according to my Storygraph stats (a great website for tracking reading habits), I have read 14 books in the past two months. I would like to share and discuss one of my favorite books in particular I have been reading from one of my favorite authors and content creators. I write this in the hopes that someone reading this will pick up the book and let it change their perspective on the world like it has changed mine.

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

Quickly becoming one of my favorite works of non fiction, The Anthropocene Reviewed is a collection of essays reviewing various aspects of the Anthropocene, a term that describes the current geological age. At the end of each review, a rating is given out of 5 stars – and these reviews are about anything from scratch-and-sniff stickers to title pages to the internet. It is both a comical and thoughtful approach to many of the topics in todays world, and I have often found myself laughing from the silliness of it all and tearing up at how amazing the world really is.

One of the reasons I have gravitated towards this book is the way in which it has helped me appreciate various aspects of human existence I seldom think about – and, perhaps even more importantly, it has helped me appreciate the world. I have learned a lot of history about various things such as Claude glasses, how scratch-and-sniff stickers work, the invention of antibiotics, and the population growth of Canadian geese. I think it is very easy in this day and age to lose faith in the world and humanity as a whole, and I was in that boat – but this book has helped me realize just how amazing the Anthropocene is despite its flaws.

I would like to end this with one of my favorite quotes from the book’s introduction:

“To fall in love with the world isn’t to ignore or overlook suffering, both human and otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and distance of the stars. … I want to look away from feeling. I want to deflect with irony, or anything else that will keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.”

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

Designing a Room in a Text-Based Adventure Game

We have come to the part in our project where our main focus is shifting to the story. This is what makes any work of interactive fiction a game – without the story, there is no game. Storytelling in a text-based adventure is largely done through environmental storytelling; there are no visuals (other than ASCII art on occasion), no narrator to guide the player, and few (if any) other characters to interact with. This makes the design of the rooms and the objects within them crucial to the experience; designing such rooms, the basic building block in any text-based adventure game, will be my main focus going forward.

Deciding what types of rooms make sense for the environment is one of the first steps alongside creating a map to aid in development. It is important to remember that users will not have a map in-game, and so the order of the rooms must be logical without being too complicated. I started to lay out the beginnings of a map in the past week for our game:

A map of the layout of the rooms in our game. The courtyard to the west leads to a flooded chamber, an underground passage, and then an armory. To the east, it leads to an astronomy room, both a study and a room of doors, and a mushroom forest.
First map iteration for our text-based adventure game.

I added an underground passage coming from the flooded chamber since it seems to me that the flooded chamber would already be partially underground. West of that, there is an armory due to it having easy access to the outdoors via the passage (I imagined in its prime, this castle would use that as a secret passage). To the east of the courtyard, the astronomy room leads to some curious places – I thought of this as the research wing, and so I added a wizard’s study, a room of doors (a curious room that appears as a void with doors in all directions), and a mushroom forest (a callback to the glowing mushrooms in the courtyard seen earlier).

As for the tower, that is also a callback: when the user first enters the game, they appear in the courtyard where a large tower looms in the distance looking strangely untouched compared to the rest of the castle. What is it doing there? Why is it not partially in ruins like the rest of the castle? Due to this oddity, it seemed like it could be the location of the logical endpoint to the game.

There is much more to come for this game’s story – and I will avoid giving too many more spoilers from now on! In the meantime, I hope this glimpse into our story-building process was interesting and inspires creativity for those who are working on their own stories too.

Reaching the Midpoint and Our Demo

This week marked the midway point for my team’s text-based adventure game project. The prior week passed by in a blur as we worked hard to get it ready for a demo – after getting the needed functionalities done or close to done, it was time to put all of the pieces together! And I am happy to report that the process was surprisingly seamless. As the writer of the script that runs the game, I was the first who got to actually run the game, and the excitement I felt at seeing it all work so well together was palpable. There is almost nothing so satisfying as seeing a well thought-out plan come together, especially after so much work!

To celebrate our success (and live up to my word), I would like to present a short playthrough video of our demo to show off most of our game’s current features. Enjoy!

A playthrough of our demo showcasing most features.

In the coming weeks, we will be adding the final touches to the game such as adding many more rooms, bringing the story together, and fully implementing save/load functionality. I am excited to dive in to the final stretch after taking a much deserved day off.