Hi people,
I've made a concsious decision now to get into games development as a career path. Im currently doing a TAFE Diploma of Software Engineering and after this i'll hopefully get int a Uni/AIE course for games.
Unfortunately my course only covers java, VB6, Javascript, Asp and DHTML programming/scripting.
So last night i decided to start teaching myself C++
Luckily its not too diff from java, in concepts anyway, i like it a lot better so far too. ANyway, i've decided my first decent C++ project will be a text based adventure game, like one of my old fav's, THGTTG (hitchikers guide).
Has anyone here completed a game like this?
Im interested in knowing
a) How long it took you to complete the game, inc details about design stage, code stage, debug stage, etc
b) how experienced you were when you wrote it
c) What langauge you wrote it in
d)Some good online resources for this kind of thing
e)Any tips, information, etc you would like to share with me
Thank you !
The longest part of writing a text-based adventure, is going to be creating the game data, not the engine.
Provided you design the "engine" to be generic enough from the beginning, you should be able to code it early on, and spend the remainder of your time creating game data (without the need to go back to the code and add features etc).
You could easily code this game in C++, although I can't see there being too many levels of abstraction / classes etc in a text-based adventure.
I haven't played THGTTG, so I'm not sure what that was like. What sort of "feel" are you going to give this text-based adventure? Will it be the classic "room"-style adventure, where each room has a description, a number of exits, some items etc? That system becomes quite easy to represent: Have a class for a room, which contains a linked list of exits, a linked list of items, a linked list of opponents etc. You'd probably create classes for each of those things, too (exits, items, opponents - exits could simply be a pointer, though).
It wouldn't be unrealistic to store the entire world in memory, along with each item etc.
There's bound to be quite a bit available on the web - if you're going with the room-based system, MUD's (Multi-User Dungeons) are on a similar path, although their source is likely to be overly complex dealing with the multiplayer issues.