In the City

A text-based adventure game set approximately in Philadelphia in a far-future world.
Currently, the game engine works, the main loop works, and I can read and initialize a set of rooms for the player to explore from JSON.
There are objects in the room which are interactable, all the command words work, there is a menu, there is a character who can join the party, and combat works with adverdarial and neutral NPCs.
Some character names are pulled from things I was watching at the time I made them, and that will change:

• The party member is named chunky [see Tim Robinson sketch. "What do you do???"]
• The neutral character is named Gilear [see D20 Fantasy High for the most neutral character I could think of]

Upcoming Work:

Phase 6: Working Demo

Keep adding individual game elements in a "test data" format.

• GAME STATE MODIFICATIONS

  • Organize all my files (method calls and such, the ordering of methods).
  • How does the technologist learn new spells?
  • Put a hint in the (room? game state? player inventory?).
  • Make sure the hint is usable. Regeneration is the next step.
  • Hint command needs to be updated, as does player.java useHint.
  • Put timed events in the game.
  • Start with hint regeneration.
  • How about health regeneration as well?
    • Party member health also needs to regen.
  • Have some kind of clock tick that calls to random events periodically.
    • Or have those events result from player movement. Decide here.
    • Can technically change it later.
    • If the random events are timed, make sure that you pause that counter in a menu state.
  • Go over all todos to make sure you hit all timed events.
    • Traps will need to be basically fully redone here.
  • Add status effects.
  • This is a natural follow-up to having health regen -- some status effects will cause health drain.
  • Having just set up some sort of timing system, it makes sense to say "x amount of time or x moves without food causes hunger status."
  • Put a morality field in the player object.
  • This really doesn't have to do anything yet and is as easy to update as health.
    • (When I'm typing this, I haven't begun thinking about coding combat. Maybe health was a nightmare to update, who knows.)
  • Put a safe zone in the game (room 1).
  • Make the random events that are combat-based not occur in the safe room.
  • Make the safe room have an inventory.
    • Make trapped items appear in that inventory.
    • Figure out how to access it.
  • Build out the feature to locate the safe zone.
    • This one is a job and a half.
    • Could I just say (safe zone is at [coordinates of all adjacencies needed to get to safety?])
  • Put an economic zone in the game (at this stage, probably make attic safe and room 1 economic).
  • Make the random events that are combat-based not occur in the economic zone.
  • Make random barter events.
    • Have them only occur in the economic zone.
    • (Yes, really. When you're setting up the Metalwoods, is some guy gonna try to sell you a fish while you're fighting the fomorian?)

• MISC UPDATES

  • Trim the name entered by the user to be all lowercase but first letter upper case.
  • Add sleep function(s), probably many of them, before printing to the console so that messages don't appear many at once but instead prit one-at-a-time.
  • There should be a way to see remaining carry weight.
  • Update the inventory function.
  • Rather than listing a million fuel cells if you hold a million fuel cells, format as:

    fuel cell   50  
    otherItem   1  
    etc  

  • Also, make sure it shows the inventory for the whole party.
  • Do I want a thievery mechanic?
  • Probably for the negotiator, since simplifying the barter system completely nerfed them.
  • Put a quest in the (room? game? NPC friend?).
  • Decide what quests do to gamestate.
    • Probably it will have to change the region (major quests at least) once complete.
  • Decide whether quests come from Java or JSON.
    • The JSON idea might be stupid.
  • At this point, implement leveling for party members and NPCs.
  • Player Leveling Mechanics
  • Pay attention to the fact that both max and remaining carry weight will need to increase.
  • Pay attention to the fact that party members should also level up here.
  • Pay attention to the fact that this should come from EXP -- that will make side quests worthwhile without fully breaking the game.
    • You can have EXP from (fights, stealth achievements, bartering achievements) be static per region and scale with the leveling equation.
  • Add an "introduction" screen.
  • This will be called from a method in the game engine (which, when I get to persistence, can be put in an if/else depending on what is passed into main).
  • Just introduce the game before proceeding.
  • Reassess demo at this time.
  • In the planning stage, currently seems like this is a full demo.
  • Check ALL TODO comments in every file.
  • (Assuming that the demo is in fact done) host the demo.
  • Find out what changes need to be made to host the demo online.
    • Possibly just host the demo game online, and make the one with levels and save states run local. That way, you can have persistence without a backend.
    • If that isn't reasonable, update the README to provide a detailed description of running the game.
  • Tell friends to test it.

NEXT PHASES

• Phase 7: Codebase Creation

  • Create files for all items.
  • If the deserializer gives you issues, put JSON methods in the switch statements rather than before it (see CharacterDeserializer).
  • And all spells.
  • And all NPCs.
  • And everything and anything else.
  • Pay close attention to the conveyance. It'll be basically an NPC, I guess. It will have an inventory with functionally no weight limit.

• Phase 8: Persistence

  • Create methods for saving and loading game states to test persistence.

• Phase 9: The Actual Game Itself

  • Start coding the levels one-by-one, modularly add them to the game.

Information:

If you somehow stumbled onto this page and are interested in someday playing a text-based adventure game set in a far-future Philadelphia that draws primary influence from "A Dark Room," "Unsleeping City," and "Annihilation" and is overall kind of a bummer,
don't read anything in the resources folder because it contains significant spoilers.
I'll make the test game playable and include instructions for that much later. Current ETA is probably around 12/25/24