Strangely Consistent

Theory, practice, and languages, braided together

Another month of blogging: adventure game, here I come!

Last summer I spent a month blogging about basic programming, building stuff up out of small building blocks into bigger and bigger games. The exercise was modeled on some books I liked when I was a teenager and curious about programming.

The last game was a text adventure game. It became... big. More ambitious than I had planned.

It's not that it had that many rooms or was that long. It didn't even experience feature creep. It was just a fairly big and ambitious game. I finished it, but more than half a month after I had planned. In retrospect, it was insane to assume I would be able to write it in the last two days of that month of blogging. Dedicating a whole month to writing the adventure game would have been more appropriate.

So, that's what I will do. I will write exactly the same game over the scope of a month. Well, functionally it will be the same. The details of the implementation will be different. Better.

We will learn a lot together, dear reader. Things that got lost in a sea of details last year.

What's more, there are a couple of other advantages with doing this all over again:

There will be zillions of spoilers for the actual game. If you know a way to give a detailed public account of how to implement an open-source adventure game without giving away the whole plot, get in touch.

Until I conclude this blogging month, there will be an ongoing mini-contest known as "Devastate The Adventure Game". Basically, you download the game and run it on Rakudo. If at any point during its development you manage to get the game to behave outside of its intended parameters, you're in the contest. I want to hear about all instances of this, and I'll do my best to log them all publicly. The most insane, creative, simply up-the-wall fruit-bat bananas mis-use of the game (decided by me; any number of entries per person) wins an Amazon book worth about 50 EUR. Crazy stunts may get honorable mentions in the blog posts, too.

Suddenly this feels pretty exciting. 哈哈 Come on folks, nail the masakbot!

Oh, and I wrote a plan for the whole month. Subject to change, but the basic structure is hopefully there.

Stand by, blog post number one is already in the pipeline.