TheWorld text based adventure game programmed in C#. Used as a final project for Intro Programming.
- Microsoft Visual Studio (For Windows or Mac)
- Xamarin Studio, which I have used to develop
TheWorld provides the foundation for an Object Oriented approach to a game. It has very basic functionality as examples for students to build on. The project provides basic classes which students can implement and develop extensions for. This project allows students to explore class hierarchy, static classes, interfaces, and object interaction.
The project should be introduced with a read-through of the classes and discussion of how the different classes work together. The WorldBuilder.cs class is an excellent place to start.
When naming objects, areas, items or anything else, it is important to remember that the unique identifiers for each thing must be all lowercase and cannot contain spaces.
For example:
start.AddItem(new Item()
{
Name = "Boulder",
Description = "It's a big granite boulder. It has a weird glyph carved into it, but you can't make any sense of it."
}, "boulder");
The last parameter in the AddItem method is the unique identifier (unique within the start area, anyway). The Name and Description fields are not subject to this rule because they are only used for display. the unique identifier must be all lowercase and have no spaces because it is a word that the user types as part of a command.
It should be noted that this is an artifact of how the Program.ParseCommand method is written. This is something students can improve!
Areas must be linked together in order to be functionally a part of the world. Also, if that connection is supposed to be bi-directional, the areas must also be doubly linked.
For Example:
start.AddNeighbor(stream, "north");
stream.AddNeighbor(start, "south");
This ensures that when I go north from the start Area, I enter the stream Area and can go south to return to start. This also means that I can create Areas which are connected in only one direction (like, falling down a cliff to go from one Area to another).
Some of the provided algorithms in the base code are deliberately poorly written with the intent that students will make improvements to the functionality. Some of these problems are within the provided methods, while others are more structural (e.g. the logical placement of methods into particular classes).
Some code is also missing entirely! The "help" command, as it is, is not very helpful at all. These methods are flagged with TODO: comments.