Small Design Up Front

If you are new to developing applications, you may struggle to decide where to begin. Before writing a line of code, you should carefully consider what it is that you're trying to achieve. In the case of a text adventure, how do we expect it to behave? What do we want it to do?

At its most basic, a text adventure has the following process:

1. Present information about the player's current location.
2. Take input from the player.
3. Change the state of the game according to the player's input.

That's it. This simplicity is one of the main reasons that a text adventure is such a valuable entry level project. Of course, this short list only covers a text adventure in its most basic form.

It's tempting to think of an application as a single entity, but it is more accurate to think of an application as the sum of its parts and the sum of the interactions between those parts.

When designing your application, you must consider what objects it may need and what messages those parts may expect to send and receive.

We will examine these concepts more closely in the next chapter.

Work Prompts

At the end of each section, I will present a few prompts for you. Sometimes it will be to enhance your game with the concepts we've just covered. Sometimes it will just be a question to ask yourself.

• What other features might the game include in the future? Puzzles? Combat?