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Feature
Adventure Games
A look at a simple state machine
Issue: 4.1 (September/October 2005)
Author: Thomas Reed
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 7,721
Starting Page Number: 34
RBD Number: 4116
Resource File(s): None
Related Link(s): None
Known Limitations: None
Excerpt of article text...
When I was a kid, I learned the basics of BASIC (forgive the unintentional pun). However, being primarily self-taught, I knew nothing that my BASIC language book could not teach me, which was nothing more than syntax. I possessed no understanding of such things as data structures and algorithms. I suppose I did know about arrays, but I had yet to figure out exactly what they were good for. When I imagined such advanced concepts as artificial intelligence, all I could envision was a huge conglomeration of loops and if-then statements, hard-coding every possible response to every possible stimulus. Ahh, the ignorance of youth!
It was they heyday of the Commodore-64 and the text-based adventure games made popular by Infocom. Since I had always been very interested in Dungeons & Dragons, the idea of creating my own adventure game fascinated me. However, my first attempts were cumbersome to write and play, since every room had its own convoluted if-then-else statement designed to handle all allowed user inputs. As you might imagine, my first games never got larger than maybe a dozen rooms with only a handful of things you could interact with, in only very limited ways. Not much fun.
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