Need Help With My Text Adventure

[signupman]

I'm new at Qbasic, but I realy like it's old school feel and graphics. I decided that it would be best to start with a text adventure, but I'm having problems finding a good tutorial that will explain how I should go about putting the room descriptions into an array and how to make a parser...I am looking for something that explains the concepts very simply. I hope that I have given enough information for someone to answer but if not I can give more description of my problems. Thanks in advance for your help.

[Pete]

There's a decent tutorial on writing text adventures by Terry Cavanagh right here:
http://www.petesqbsite.com/sections/tut ... res_tc.txt

You can also find a lot of GREAT information and source code on Dunric's websites:

• *The 1 to 2K Text Adventure Competition (going on right now -- you should definitely enter!): http://panks.freeshell.org/advcomp.html
  *Dunric's Blog (lots of text adventure articles): http://dunric.blogspot.com/
  *Westfront PC Site (Probably the biggest and most engrossing text adventure ever made in QB): http://members.tripod.com/~panks/westfront.html
  *Dunric's Main Site: http://members.tripod.com/~panks/pindex.html

[matt2jones]

If you're new, you'd be better off starting with something simpler then a text adventure, they are quite complex if you do them right, and if you do them wrong they teach you absolutly nothing about gamemaking.

matt

[signupman]

What do you suggest that I start with?

[Anonymous]

Are you really new at QB, start with a Beginners Tutorial explaining about QB programming itself first.

Pete: concerning the above sentence... *hint*

[Pete]

Hey, my first QBasic game ever was a crappy text adventure that didn't have a parser and didn't use external data or anything... it was terrible... But it was a good introduction to programming. I personally think that making a text adventure is one of the most fun, easy ways to get started, and if you don't know how to do more advanced parsing techniques or use external data, you can easily work around it.

Here's my first QBasic game ever, called "Area 51":
http://www.petesqbsite.com/sections/history/AREA51.BAS

Oh, and Neo-- ::wink, wink::

[Anonymous]

Well, you really did a great job on that game... trying to dodge all *hard* stuff like files and scripts parsing...

Actually, when I'm now looking at it, I think of spaghetti... yum

[Pete]

You betcha - spaghetti and meatballs.

That's probably the most inefficiently-programmed game ever. Kind of embarrassing... but I was 11, if that's an excuse.

[Anonymous]

I accept it as an excuse, because when I was eleven I couldn't even make that... Instead I made other crap stuff, like a Text Adventure a.k.a. Snipes Clone kinda game Take a look here at Snipes

Btw,

357 IF A$ <> "QQKFP" THEN 357

Shouldn't this cause an eternal loop when it's not QQKFP...

[Pete]

Yeah, I had a really great algorithm going for that game.

Oh, and Snipes looks a whole heck of a lot better than Area 51.

[Anonymous]

Oh btw, my Snipes clone wasn't a text adventure but a text rpg...

Anyway, your character consisted of two letters you could type in, or if you wanted the default character, you could type nothing (default is the two-eye character = "oo"). Then you could pick up some weapons, and fire them, not diagonally as in Snipes. Plus it was quite slow and flickered sometimes... but it had 2 player mode

Great algorithms... hmnnn...

Code: Select all

PRINT "Press [Ctrl]+[Break] to quit!"
DO: LOOP

[{Nathan}]

You betcha - spaghetti and meatballs.

That's probably the most inefficiently-programmed game ever. Kind of embarrassing... but I was 11, if that's an excuse.

Hey! I am 11 and I can make a rpg... if it wasnt for apathy ... but dont rag on being 11