Text Based Adventure Game
Code:
Date:
Spring 2022
Why:
This was a requirement for my CSCI 123 Intro to Programming Concepts in C++ at Fullerton College.
What:
This is a text-based adventure game that my class was instructed to work on throughout the semester. The project was broken up into three stages. I have included my program for the final stage above.
The first stage was to create one area with one object that the player could pick up, drop, and just interact with in general. The second stage was to incorporate vectors into the game, and the third was to incorporate classes.
I have read online where I should not include coursework in a portfolio, but I do not really view this as a straight up “homework assignment”. This project allowed a lot of creative freedom, and I tried to take full advantage of that.
I wanted my game to be like a dungeon that you might find in Act 1 of Diablo 2. I have spent more time than I would like to admit in this area, especially as a kid, and I wanted to pay tribute to it in a way. It is worth noting that if you play through Act 1 you will not find any dungeons like the one in the game. There are no “fungal beasts” in Act 1 (although there are some swamp creatures in Act 3 that would probably be equally terrifying to run into in real life).
Diablo 2 is one of the first games I really got into. I also wanted to incorporate puzzles into my game. There really is not anything in the Diablo series that I would call a puzzle. There are some things in Diablo 2 (like the stones for finding Deckard Cain in Act 1, and then finding Tal Rasha’s tomb in Act 2) that could be regarded as a puzzle of sorts. Really the only type of puzzle I have seen so far is one featuring exploding tiles in Diablo 4. Maybe there are more, as I have not played through the whole game, but my point is that puzzles are not emphasized in this series.
To do that I drew inspiration from another game I spent way too much time on as a kid: Myst. The entire Myst game is just a whole bunch of puzzles. I incorporated 3 puzzles into this game total. Two of them involve a series of 3 levers with 3 possible positions that must be oriented correctly to cause an orb to appear. You need both orbs to appear in order to get into the final room (the green room). I named the rooms based off the colors in a pixel (red, green, and blue).
The final “puzzle” is more like what to do with the fungal beast. How you win is by giving the creature the “large mushroom” found in the “The Hall of Roots”. This can be seen in the gif on the homepage. You can lose in more than one way. If you did not bother taking the large mushroom, then this puzzle cannot be completed. If you give the fungal beast the rock … you learn that fungal beasts do not like rocks.
This project was something that I was not looking forward to at first, but I ended up getting really into it. One thing I was not able to work out while I was working on the game was that I wanted the player to have both orbs in their bag in order to get into the green room. I was not able to figure out a good fix for this and have not attempted to produce one since. What I ended up doing was just saying if you had made both orbs appear then that was good enough. So technically you could pick both orbs up and drop them in any of the three rooms that you can access at that point, and the green room will still open. This seems unrealistic, even by “Fever Dream” standards, and is something that I would improve if I ever did this project again.
Back to top