Keeb's Quest - 003 Primitive scripting for a larger test

Is this actually fun?

Page created: 2019-11-05

Now it was time to test if the "core mechanic" was any fun! My family enjoyed the previous tiny example and the idea of typing branching text to choose a path in the "adventure" seemed pretty solid.

But would it hold up in a larger narrative?

This next demo uses a nearly identical "engine" - it’s actually a little shorter at 140 lines instead of 150. :-)

But I certainly wasn’t going to type out a large example with the hard-coded indexes I’d used before!

So I created an extremely simple "game script" format to author the content. Using indentation plus an "arrow" (→) syntax to represent branching made it pretty easy to write and read the game script.

Here’s an excerpt taken from the top of the whole game.script file:

;; start
    i was in the forest
        and i wandered to a
            waterfall -> waterfall
            cave -> cave

;; waterfall
    the cool water thundered down
        and i was
            brave -> behind_falls
            frightened -> field

;; behind_falls
    so i stepped closer
        and saw that there was a
            space behind the falls
                so i
                    searched it -> search
                    ran away -> field

A 78-line AWK script called script2json.awk converted the game.script to a JSON data structure called game.json.

Here’s a tiny portion of the JSON data (you can see that the AWK script doesn’t bother to indent or otherwise pretty-print the JSON output):

{
"start":{
"paths": [
{"str":"i was in the forest"
, "paths": [
{"str":"and i wandered to a"
, "paths": [
{"str":"waterfall"
,"sect":"waterfall"
},
{"str":"cave"
,"sect":"cave"
}]
}]
}]
},

A little SVG sketch provides the tiniest bit of atmosphere:

screenshot of the scripted branching typing demo

Click on the screenshot above or this link to try it out: 003/index.html

The whole thing was pretty much stream-of-conciousness and it makes for a pretty crummy game and a pretty crummy story. But I think it answers the basic question:

Q: "Is this a fun way to play a game?"

A: "No."

I’m a normal 60+ WPM typist and I found it to be a total pain to get through even a small portion of the script. Especially navigating back to areas and chosing a different path.

It’s not fun to type an area the first time, and it’s awful to type something twice.

So no, this wasn’t going to work in its current form. I would need to refine the idea.