The Shivers
Over the Christmas holidays of 2016 I played the game Firewatch https://www.firewatchgame.com/ ,it reminded me of the classic Interactive Fiction games of old, a genre I discovered that is still alive and well https://ifcomp.org/comp/2016, it also led me to this documentary which whilst it might be a big long and nerdy for some I also really enjoyed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o15itQ_EhRo
This all got me thinking that creating my own Text based Adventure game would be an excellent project for learning Angular 2+ and Typescript, so I started work on “The Shivers”. It’s a short game, but has enough in it to encompass several core Angular / Typescript concepts, manipulating dom, data and incorporating Dependency Injection, Services, Components and Directives. The game is entirely driven from a model so multiple games can be built without needing to touch the code. At the core of this is what I’ve started to call a decision engine, here’s a snippet.
{
"action":"Insert mouthpiece into the horn",
"conditions":{"areCarrying":["HUNTING_HORN","MUSICAL_MOUTH_PIECE"]},
"results":{"message":"You now have a playable hunting horn.","take":["PLAYABLE_HORN"],"destroys":["MUSICAL_MOUTH_PIECE","HUNTING_HORN"]}
}
Actions are the commands available to the user as i didn’t want the annoying verb noun guessing of some adventure games.
There are several condition types, such as are carrying, room contains, location and have talors( Money ).
The results will always have a message and will perform a number of result actions:
message, change score, change location, destroy object, take object, drop object, change room description, add talors, remove talors, create exit and close exit.
These options are enough to build very complex combinations of puzzles to solve and its easy to add more should they crop up.
[Update 25/3/17]
Angular 4 was released a couple of days ago, have just updated the game from 2.3.1, nothing too painful a few dependency updates and some small code changes, but nothing horrible. Angular library looks like its almost halved in size from 800k to 450k, but that includes a lot of packages so cant see it getting much bigger even for a huge application. Game code has increased from 27k to 45k but I guess thats the trade off. Seems to be running faster as well 🙂
