RFC: ASCII Castle Adventure Game

[dealingwith]

Overview

When I was a kid in the 1980's, I played for hours and hours a terminal-based text adventure game called Castle. I would like to recreate the Castle game in Ruby.

The basics of the game are the player is an adventurer in a castle. The castle has mutiple levels. Each level has a grid of rooms. The player moves throughout the rooms fighting monsters, finding loot chests, finding the stairs to the next floor, etc.

The Problem

Background & Motivation

The world needs more text-based adventures! They are fun. :)

Solution

Goals

MVP

• Player can launch the game
• Player is presented a map of level 1
• Player can move 1 space in any direction
• Player can interact with contents of that room

Stretch goals

• Rooms display their contents after they've been discovered by player
• Levels 2-N
• Some endgame

Non-goals

• No graphics--all ASCII characters to represent the player, map, rooms, and contents of those rooms
• Only a command-line application--no dedicated app package

Dependencies

none that I can think of right now

Alternatives/Prior Art

• This was NOT the game, I think the game I want to copy was a bad copy of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Adventure
  • Look into http://seed7.sourceforge.net/scrshots/castle.htm
  • We could repurpose the monsters http://www.thealmightyguru.com/Reviews/CastleAdventure/CA-Monsters.html

Detailed Design

ASCII grid. e.g.

A ・ ・ ・ ・  
・ ・ ・ ・ ・  
・ ・ ・ ・ ・  
・ ・ ・ ・ ・  
・ ・ ・ ・ ・  

with a prompt

>

commands:

• N
• S
• E
• W

upon entering a room, some description of what is in that room

• Monster
• NPC
  • I haven't thought this part through yet. There could be a few different kinds of non-hostile NPCs. Animals, other humans...
• Chest
• Item
• Trap

further commands based on what the thing in the room is

• Open
• Attack
• Talk
• Pet
• Take

constraint: one thing per room!

One thing I like about this project is it would be relatively easy to develop iteratively and continuously (for a while), adding new elements and game mechanics over time.

[dealingwith]

Randomization system?

[dealingwith]

Randomization system for:

• Battle
• Contents of loot chests
• Contents of rooms
• etc

[dealingwith]

• [ ] investigate using OpenAI to generate room contents