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How to program a text adventure in C (2016)

by phodo on 3/22/20, 4:19 AM with 35 comments

• by bserfaty on 3/22/20, 10:50 AM

  I suggest to look into https://ifcomp.org/ - the annual interactive fiction competition is running for 25 years now and there are some great games and resources over there.

• by franze on 3/22/20, 10:11 AM

  Ask HN: what's a good JS (browser focused) text adventure engine? I see me making a text adventure (adding one mini chapter) each day as a good lockdown project.

  Note: I might call it "Everything is better in quarantine." The goal would be to (not) go mad.

• by japanoise on 3/22/20, 7:57 AM

  I like this, very creative!

  The code generation looks interesting. I'll have to take another look later; can it not be done with the preprocessor?

• by hendrikhalkow on 3/22/20, 1:07 PM

  Awesome work. Thanks. Looking forward to see more of those vintage games again :)

• by hereisdx on 3/23/20, 4:36 AM

  Wow! This tutorial was very fun to follow.

• by disqard on 3/22/20, 11:29 AM

  Thank you for writing this up!

• by gustavorg on 3/22/20, 11:45 AM

  This programmer, Mr. Ruud Helderman, is like Cool McCool, "Danger is my business!". For example, the parser, function matchParam:

    OBJECT *obj;
    par->tag = src;
    par->distance = *src == '\0' ? distNoObjectSpecified : distUnknownObject;
    forEachObject(obj)
      ... 
  

  The initialization of the obj variable received an obliviate spell.

  Also function parseAndExecute (). The way he deal with invalid input is, epic:

    static const COMMAND commands[] =
    {
        {executeQuit      , "quit"},
        {executeLookAround, "look"},
        ...
    }
    for (cmd = commands; !matchCommand(input, cmd->pattern); cmd++);
    return (*cmd->function)();

• by anthk on 3/22/20, 1:19 PM

  It's ok, but inform 6 is better for this.