Build Your Own Adventure

Today we’re going to build an object-oriented engine to support “choose your own adventure” games — also known as "text adventures" or "interactive fiction." For example, a player might face a choice, enter a decision, and see the result:

Welcome. Do you choose to go left, or right?
1) left
2) right
1

Ah, good choice. Good choice.

(Had the adventurer chosen option 2, the game would have said “There be dragons there” and ended.)

Immediately we see that the game needs to support branching — responding in different ways depending on user input. Systems like the one we’re building are often called State Machines. Some of you may have studied these in school. Whether the concept is new or familiar, you may want to take a couple minutes to watch this video.

Setup

Clone this repo to your computer
Run npm install from within the cloned repo folder
Open the cloned folder in your text editor

Orientation

test contains spec files to guide you in completing the workshop.
src contains source code files you must write to implement the game engine.
example contains an example game demonstrating how the engine is used. You should read this but not change it.

Instructions

Examining the System

Begin by checking out example/example.game.js. See if you can piece together what is going on. Diagram out the game graph (which decisions lead to which game states) and note the main objects and methods being used.

Following the Specs

Refer to the test specs in the test folder, as well as our description of the game components at the bottom of this README. Run npm test to execute the test suite and check your progress. We recommend you tackle the exercises in the following order:

Pass test/node.test.js and test/connection.test.js first.
Try test/game.test.js after solving the other two specs. Change xdescribe to describe to activate this spec.

Completing the Engine

Once you pass all the specs, the Game class is properly built, but it has not yet been "plugged in" to work with a command line interface (CLI). There is one more file to complete: src/player.js.

The job of this file is to pull in example/example.game.js and tie it together with the inquirer library, launching an actual game which a user can interact with in the command line. There are no specs for this final part; you will know everything is working when npm start launches the command-line choose-your-own-adventure example game.

Components

We’re going to build this engine with several suggested components. We’ve set up files for each one in this project. We also wired them up to talk to each other.

Node: A node is a single question or prompt in a game. Not to be confused with the technology Node.js which we are also studying at Fullstack. This is particularly confusing because we have a file called node.js in this project, and because this project is built in Node.
Connection: Connections represent the circumstances under which our game changes from one state to another. For the question “Would you like a cookie?” the connections might have the conditions “yes” and “no.”
Game: The game is what holds everything together. It's the interface that a game programer would use to construct these games. It exposes methods like addNode and connect. It keeps track of all the nodes in a JavaScript object.
Player: This is a component that is basically the “user interface”. It works with an npm package to present the current question to the user.
Example Game: uses the Game class to build a game instance. You don't need to change this.

ohhheyyyy / gha-adventure-game-two