G'day....

Despite advice from a friend to jump into the deep end and get my teeth into a "real world project" I was still interested in doing some guided exercises to get my brain into gear. To that end after some duck'n (duck-duck-go 4dawin yo!) I found an old tutorial from a website called 3DBuzz. The tutorial was free on uTube and it's subject was the very game type I wished to do for my learning project. A "Text Adventure Game". I get that a text adventure game isn't exactly ground breaking as an idea for a project to learn on, but it actually aligns with my main short term goals. My nick isn't "Adventure4Life" for nothing!

• C# Starter - Hyperion Text Adventure Tutorial - (3Dbuzz) @uTube
• My Version of the Hyperion Project @GitHub

While I much prefer working from a text book I found the tutorial to be pretty interesting. Videos just take so much longer to get to the point. A single paragraph you could read in 10 seconds is like 10 minuets in a video!... anyway. It really covered the exact same ground as my previous introductory books I have been going through so there was little new information. Still it was cool to see a realised project in the planning stages.

I only ran the tutorial series until the 1/2 way mark. Once you get there it is really just a matter of data entry to fill in the requirements to make it an actual "game" the functioning "engine" part so to speak was all done in the earlier stages of the tutorial. I did complete watching the tutorial but felt that I didn't need to go and write everything out to completion in VS with this one.

So, What now?

Well, now it is time to try and produce my own game project. The goal is to make a Text Adventure Game, though I am keeping the Current GameDev Challenge (Dungeon Crawler) in mind. If I get my framework up quickly enough I may be able to add additional features to the game to make it valid for submission to that competition. As I think a text adventure games and a text dungeon crawlers share many design elements. Mazes, Inventories, Objects, Rooms, Players, NPCs, Dialogue, Weight Limits, etc, etc.

The 3D Buzz Project while interesting as an exercise that is well presented and informative, was of little use to me for my own goals and desirers. As I said much of the tutorial was going over ground I have recently covered, so for me, the most interesting part was the project planning videos. The game itself is also far to simplistic, as an example for me to build off. Particularly in the command interface. My long term goal (far beyond this project) is to learn natural language processing and I would love my text adventure to have a much more robust command phrasing system. Now it will not have anything like a NLP, but I believe due to the confines of context in the project, I will be able to build a phrasing system that gives an illusion of a NLP system, to some limited extent. I do not want people to type "Get Sword", "Exit North", etc, etc, though they could if they chose but I'd also like the user to be able to enter commands like "go pick up the ball and throw it into the basketball hoop" and have the game understand them. This is the "challenge" I have set myself.

I will go into more detail on my actual project, which I am calling "Test Adventure" (shout out to Granddaddy Advent y'all!!) and it's other goals in a later Blog Post.

Thanks for reading!

--A4L

Happy Holidays!!