Next
This series of nodes describes how those interactive fiction,
adventure games like Zork and the original Colossal Cave
adventure game work. I chose C as the programming language
for all the examples because it seems to be the most widely used,
and the most likely to still be around in 20 years.
The first time I encountered a text adventure game was
not on a computer at all. It was in a book called
The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder, a book
about the engineers at
Data General who were working to build the Eagle, a
computer meant to compete with DEC's VAX.
The book contained a description of the original Colossal Cave
adventure by
Crowther and Woods, and gave tantalizing little
excerpts of the program's output. This output amazed me at the
time. I would read these little excerpts over and over wondering
if it was genuine. I didn't know too much about computers then, and I
strained my brain wondering how it was possible for the computer to
seemingly understand input in English, and generate meaningful
responses, seemingly understanding what it was directed to do.
I wondered if this program were for real, or if the author had
taken some artistic license to make it seem better than it
really was. I soon found out that it was for real though,
and this fact got me going.
I immediately set out to build one of these games myself,
but I was very naive. I began with a section of BASIC code
dedicated to describing each "room" in the game, and a series
of gotos and gosubs depending on the player's typed input
in each of these "rooms". This was a very very wrong way to
go about it as I soon discovered.
I looked around in various books, and could find nothing
that even began to tell how such a game worked. Eventually,
I found an advertisement in (the now defunct) Compute!
magazine for a little pamphlet describing how such games were
made, and included a BASIC program for an example game. So
I sent away for it. The name of the sample game was, appropriately
enough, Deathship. It was some of the most horrible code I have
ever seen. It performed as advertised, but it was made to run
on a machine with 16k RAM, and it squeezed out every byte possible.
Spaces in the source were dispensed with, an unnecessary luxury,
no spaces. The names of verbs and nouns were significant only
to the first two characters..., and the longer version of
these words were contained nowhere in the program. I never
did figure out what some of those words were supposed to be.
Anyway, as bad as it was, it did teach me the concepts
behind adventure games well enough that I could write my own code.
What I needed, it turned out, was the concept of
arrays. Clever use of arrays is what makes
these games tick, and Deathship was my bewildering and
fascinating introduction to them.
But, I'm getting ahead of myself.
Eventually, I did manage to write a passable adventure game
in Turbo Pascal with a parser that could do everything that
the Infocom parser in Zork could do, plus a bunch more stuff.
(I really need to resurrect that computer and save that code.)
But this node is not about building a sophisticated
parser like that. This
node is about the basics, and will describe just enough to get
you started. Enough to get you started that is, if you're goal is to
write such a game from scratch in C, or to learn about C while
having a fun programming project to tinker with. If your goal is
to write a serious adventure game, you'd probably be better off
starting in a different place, standing on the shoulders of giants,
using any of the many adventure writing toolkits out there, such
as TADS, to name one.
So, If this sounds like your kind of thing, keep reading.
Next
| 
