Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
Following on from the general framework bits in the previous posts about building a text adventure, what needs doing to create an example game? Here's an explanation of the example repo game to show how it all goes together. [ Spoiler warning - if you want the fun of playing the example game, don't read this post before you play, as it explains some of the puzzles.]
Last time up we created the very basics of a text adventure where we could look at rooms in the world, and had a way to provide other commands like movement or picking stuff up. So what can we do to let the world react to the user's actions, and create puzzles and atmosphere for a game? Step forward behaviours...
The world model from the previous post is all well and good, but the player needs to be able to interact with it. What do we need to add to allow that? Well we need an abstraction for the things the game is going to allow the player to do.
As you might guess from someone who's been writing a blog for a decade, text adventures were something I really liked back in the day. I spent a lot of time on classic Infocom games like The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But what if you wanted to build your own as a .Net developer? This blog series has some suggestions...
I've been reinstalling some PCs recently, and one of them is the machine I play games on in front of the TV. My eldest child still enjoys a bit of Minecraft every so often, so I needed to put that back on my freshly formatted machine – but this proved more difficult than I was expecting.
I'm pretty sure I must have encountered this issue before, but since googling failed to find my blog, I seem to have failed to write the solution down last time 😉 So, in order to save my future self working this out for third time...
It's school holidays as I type this, which means I've been out of the office keeping kids entertained rather than doing anything interesting with code. But all is not lost – because it leaves time for playing some games instead. That reminded me of a conversation I had at Sitecore's Symposium last year about "games I like because they appeal to me as a programmer" – so I thought I'd make a list of the stuff I've enjoyed wasting time with in the last few years (When I've not been playing Minecraft or Terraria with my eldest), in case they appeal to anyone else...
My son loves the Lego-branded games available via Steam. He's a massive fan of the Lego versions of Batman, Marvel and the recent Lego Movie game. But as much as he loves them, as the owner of the computer he plays on, I've found them frustrating. You buy a game, download it, and it works fine for a while. But at some point all of these games have suffered from a problem where you stop being able to launch them. Having had to figure out solutions via Google to keep my son happy, I'm writing this down so I can remember it next time...
