Todays progress step was to create a basic user interface and create a simple map to move around in.

Progress Update! After downloading more packages (always more packages) there are five rooms, travelling North-South. Obviously nothing fancy. Collects user input and if North or South (or N/S) are entered it moves the user to the matching cell and prints a room description.

Things that need to be considered (or what I’ve learned from this step):

• A mechanism to stop the user from going outside the map and most likely crashing the whole thing!
• Using JSON files is working at this point but further consideration needs to be given to where additional data such as NPC interactions, will be kept and how they will be linked to the map objects or JSON files, and where and when that will all happen.
• Do text based games have cut-scenes?
• Will enemies be a visible target in the room that may be attacked or attack you?

This evening has been successful in two respects. It’s worked so far – which is obviously the most popular and perhaps well known type of successful – but it’s also given me a number of things to consider as I continue down this path. At this point I can walk up and down a small path of five cells and my game continues to check where I am and whether it should be doing something.

The next progress step will be to expand to the full square – NSEW – and to remove some cells so that they cannot be travelled to forcing the user to choose another direction or return down the path the arrive on.

 

TL;DR – Really? This one was pretty short! I have a *very* basic user interface which accepts user input and outputs a location description based on what room/cell they have entered. This has spawned its own to-do list as proceeding outside the list of rooms causes everything to crash! Next step – fix that.