Version 25 of A text adventure game engine

Updated 2008-05-27 12:02:17 by jscottb

From a news:comp.lang.tcl posting by mailto:[email protected] :

Larry Smith: 5-27-2008 I took the liberty of factoring out these two engines to their own pages, which are now executable without needing editing. I left this page as a central listing of available text adventure engines.

Scott Beasley: 5-27-2008 Thanks for the split-out Larry!

webscool wrote:

> Has anyone written a pure Tcl/Tk engine for text based adventure games?

Larry Smith Toyed with one. It provides for a number of text-based adventure game "chores" including defining rooms and characters, building a vocabulary, clothes, etc. Here is the basic engine, followed by a moronic little space- adventure that shows how it works. It's GPL, and it will be easier to read with a wide window.

The parser is dead simple - a verb, and an object, just like the original Colossal Cave adventure. I've fixed a few bugs - the engine no longer crashes if it doesn't recognize your verb. There was a problem with re-defining "exit" - now if you die in the airlock the interpreter exits, rather than recursing into a vain attempt to leave an airlock. The "exit" verb is now gone, you can "enter" things, but you must provide exits inside them to get back out.

The vocabulary is limited but you can accomplish a surprising amount of stuff using it, with a little imagination. The highly generic "use" verb helps avoid a lot of vocabulary clutter and "guess the verb" games.

Scott Beasley 2008-05-26: This was a weekend project from about 8 years ago. It's an ALMOST working Scott Adams Text adventure [L1 ] game interpreter. I hope someone will find some good in it. Enjoy.


Category Games