textbros

A minimalistic and intuitive engine for text adventure games.

Target requirements:

• Match features of ZORK, Hitchhiker's guide, etc
• Text only! (Both playing and designing games).
• Separate layers: Game engine, Core library, User creations

Misc TODOs (and sketches)

I'm thinking, every existing thing should simply be an OBJECT. Playing the game is commandeering just one object. (Think of some way to authenticate for multiplayer).

I also think that the game file representation shouldn't be unified. Meaning that I want several equivalent ways of representing a game. For instance, directories on a computer could maybe represent a world? Or a json file, or tcl style dict.

Challenging language parsings:

• (Easy thing: verb object)
• Aliases:
  • "Go north" vs "north"
  • "Look at"
• Combinations:
  • verb object subject (maybe not so difficult)
  • ... then ...
  • ... with ...
• take all (how to do "all"?)
• clove of garlic (several words make up just one object)
• climb down stairs
• hello, troll

What's in an object?:

• Other objects
• References to objects (name or id)
• Properties (plain text)
• actions that it can use?
• meta information about it? (like "visited").
• Allowable actions? Or word classes it can serve as?

Word classes:

• (Is it necessary/useful to care about this?)
• Noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjection, numeral, article, determiner

English grammar:

(((S) (NP VP))
 ((VP) (V))
 ((VP) (V NP))
 ((V) died)
 ((V) employed)
 ((NP) nurses)
 ((NP) patients)
 ((NP) Medicenter)
 ((NP) "Dr Chan"))
 From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-expression

[Off-side rule] where increasing the indentation results in the lexer outputting an INDENT token, and decreasing the indentation results in the lexer outputting a DEDENT token. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-side_rule