Recent Posts
By LucasGodzilla on
In my last blog post, I described how we have to do a bit of grammar analysis with the parser in order to properly interpret more complex sentences. If you have not read the article, you should do so now, as the following will build upon what I described last time. While the solution I offered up last time to… Continue reading "Parser grammar power to the power of two!"
By LucasGodzilla on
When I first started playing text adventures, the thing that fascinated me the most was how the game actually understood what I meant. Parsing words and responding to them is easy, but actually determining meaning is something else entirely and it always intrigued me when a game was able to discern meaning from a sentence. Look at this, for example…… Continue reading "Parser power to manage grammar in text adventures"
By LucasGodzilla on
Amidst all the technical discussions I’ve posted, covering various implementation details of the internals for my text adventure project, over Christmas, I realized that I’ve never really talked about actual puzzles. Now, I do not claim to be an expert on any text adventure puzzle or puzzles in general, but I think, it might be helpful if I spent some… Continue reading "More complex puzzle objects in interactive fiction"
By LucasGodzilla on
In the past weeks, I’ve been adding more and more content to the game and I noticed something that I wanted to fix. When I had a room with a number of exits, they would all be listed one after the other. Exits are leading North, West and South. While there’s nothing technically wrong with this approach, it just looks… Continue reading "Exits revisited"
By LucasGodzilla on
Aside from all the game features I’ve implemented in my text adventure game so far, there is one thing I have hardly ever touched upon. Testing and debug features. With an IDE like PyCharm it is really great to be able to step through your code, keep an eye on the content of variables and follow the flow of your… Continue reading "Test Me: Debug functionality in my text adventure engine"
By LucasGodzilla on
You may recall that a little while ago I posted about the way I added the use of pronouns, like It, to the parsers of my text adventure game, that allowed you to refer to objects from your previous command. After I had finished that and used it for a little, I realized that the way I did this is… Continue reading "Let’s do it Again: Repeating commands in my text adventure"
By LucasGodzilla on
Recently, I created some item types that have different kinds of states. I’ve talked about containers before, that can have an open or closed status, and I just created another type, monsters, that can be alive or dead. When printing these items as part of the room description, I’ve decided that in some cases I’d like that status info to… Continue reading "Status is everything"
By LucasGodzilla on
While I was working on the project and testing some of the things I implemented recently, I stumbled upon a… let’s call it wrinkle. It’s nothing that is really important, but something that I felt was just missing. The pronoun “It.” When you play a text adventure, the last thing you want to see is the parser spitting a response… Continue reading "IT! (The pronoun, not the killer clown…)"
By LucasGodzilla on
By now I’ve learned that when it comes to programming and programming languages, every once in a while you get to a point where something doesn’t work the way you had expected. And occasionally then, after you figure out why it doesn’t do what you expected it to do, you will find that you don’t agree with the sentiment behind… Continue reading "Enum Whoes"
By LucasGodzilla on
After dealing with the open/closed/locked situation in containers in my last post, I think it is time to take a look at something that is fairly similar in its mechanics… doors. I already created Exits a little while ago that I use to connect rooms, but any adventure game worth its salt also has doors, and like containers, these doors… Continue reading "Time to open those doors"
