While so far in our STOS programming journey we looked at sprites and graphics, it is quite possible to have a fun game experience with only (or mostly) text, so let's take a look at that.
In Defense of Text Adventures
Why text adventures? Why would we go from sprites to text?
Firstly, as this is a programming tutorial, it allows us to introduce some extremely useful programming concepts:
- Arrays and pre-defined data
- Object definition and tracking
- Parsing strings for textual input
- Subroutines and modular coding
Second, knowing how to build an adventure game focuses us on game development ideas that make many other game genres better, such as world building, narrative, puzzles, player agency, and so on.
Data Structures
Beyond the granular numbers, characters/bytes, strings, and so on, we often need to create more macro data concepts for our programs.
Many BASIC programming languages are based off of work that Microsoft did way back in the 1970s, who were in turn inspired by BASIC interpreters they were used to.
This means for us today that BASIC very often has an array-centric view of the world. While not a terrible hinderance in fact, for a modern developer it can be quite an adjustment.
An array is simply an ordered list of data with a numerical index. Consider it for most purposes as a pointer to a space that has been reserved in memory.
If we create an array that has ten slots, then we can later refer back to see what slot 5 currently contains.
This is not as convenient as having an object class with properties, and often means we need multiple arrays to represent one game item, but it does the job well enough.
So in my planning I will come up with several arrays to represent different data needs, such as room layout, room description, room contents, and so on.
We first dimension an array with a fixed size:
dim list$(100)
Then we can set the individual array entries, eg.:
list$(0)="foo"
Yes, well spotted, STOS arrays start at index 0, which confusingly is not always the case, even in the Amiga version of STOS, AMOS.
Once we have set our value, we can recall it in a similar fashion:
print list$(0)
A cool thing about STOS arrays is you can have multiple dimensions, think of it as being able to create a table or spreadsheet instead of a simple list:
dim grid$(10,10)
We will use this concept to create our room layout, with 100 total cells.
Why a grid for rooms? I have used a couple of ways of planning floor layouts with text adventures, and chose this method because I want to have a monster that moves from room to room and hunts you (as opposed to bad guys who live in a specific room and "wake up" on your entering said room). Being able to set a monster position using X/Y coordinates makes that easier.
At the same time, I am using room numbers. This is so I can have a description for room 50, as well as set the contents of that room, and even things like if that room is lit or not.
We will get to all that in future iterations of the code, at the moment we are working on the absolute basics.
Interpreting Instructions with String Manipulation
Right now as I type this I could use any number of hundreds of natural language processing systems, not just able to understand what I type, but understand my spoken voice too.
But we don't need anything like that, even if anything close could be implemented on an air-gapped Atari ST from the 1980s.
We need just a limited vocabulary, and only a very basic sentence structure.
In fact, we don't need to translate entire commands, if we are smart the list of commands can be checked against just the first letter of the command word.
To get input we use, naturally, the input command and put the result into a variable. For matching against our list of instructions we grab the first letter, and also convert to uppercase to save having to check both upper and lower versions.
input CMD$ : IN$=upper$(left$(CMD$,1))
For directions we can simply check the compass letters, N, E, S, W, and this will allow the player to enter "north" or "N" and still go where they need to go.
Before the player is moved, we check that direction is available by looking to our room layout grid for a non-zero result. Our rooms are using strings so to check for a numeric comparison we must use val to get the mathematical value of the string.
100 print "Command"; : input CMD$ : IN$=upper$(left$(CMD$,1))
101 sp=instr(CMD$," ") : rem Space between words
102 obj$=right$(CMD$,len(CMD$)-sp) : rem Specified Object
110 if IN$="N" and val(ROOMS$(X,Y-1))>0 then Y=Y-1
120 if IN$="E" and val(ROOMS$(X+1,Y))>0 then X=X+1
130 if IN$="W" and val(ROOMS$(X-1,Y))>0 then X=X-1
140 if IN$="S" and val(ROOMS$(X,Y+1))>0 then Y=Y+1
150 if IN$="G" then gosub 2000 : rem get
160 if IN$="U" then gosub 3000 : rem use
170 if IN$="D" then gosub 4000 : rem drop
180 if IN$="K" then gosub 5000 : rem kill
190 if IN$="Q" then print "Goodbye!" : end
200 goto 50
For interacting with objects, we will need both the command and the object, separately. To do this we find the first occurrence of a space character then get the portion of the string that is from that character to the end of the string. Unless the player types something weird, that should be our object name, even of the object name has a space in it.
Rather than try to fit all the code for dealing with those object commands right in the if statement, instead we use the GOSUB command which allows us to execute another part of the program and then come back to continue where we left off. This splits our code into much more manageable chunks.
Rooms, Navigation & Foundational Code
This has already run long so let's take a look at where we are at, then develop more features in another post.
Our code here will allow us to navigate between rooms (doesn't currently check for locked doors, of course) and it displays any room descriptions (of which there are only a few).
Rather than specify lots of ROOM$(10)="Something", we use the DATA and READ commands. Each time you read you pull the next value from the next data, which allows you to have long, arbitrary lists of values in your code. The data statements can be anywhere in the code, but just have to line up with what you are expecting to read, IE. you can't read a string into a numeric variable.
For us this means we can go through and add the room descriptions all in one place rather than lots of variable declarations or store them on disk as a file.
05 rem Adventure boilerplate by Chris Garrett @retrogamecoders
06 rem =======================================================
07 :
10 mode 1 : key off : cls
20 dim ROOMS$(40,40) : dim ROOMDESC$(100)
30 for Y=0 to 9 : for X=0 to 9 : read R : ROOMS$(X,Y)=str$(R) : next X : next Y
40 X=4 : Y=5 : gosub 10000 : rem initialize start room
45 rem ========================================
46 rem USER INPUT
47 rem ========================================
50 cls : locate 0,0 : room = (y * 10) + x : inverse on: print roomdesc$(room): inverse off: print "Available Exits:"
60 if val(ROOMS$(X,Y-1))>0 then print "> North"
70 if val(ROOMS$(X+1,Y))>0 then print "> East"
80 if val(ROOMS$(X-1,Y))>0 then print "> West"
90 if val(ROOMS$(X,Y+1))>0 then print "> South"
100 print "Command"; : input CMD$ : IN$=upper$(left$(CMD$,1))
101 sp=instr(CMD$," ") : rem Space between words
102 obj$=right$(CMD$,len(CMD$)-sp) : rem Specified Object
110 if IN$="N" and val(ROOMS$(X,Y-1))>0 then Y=Y-1
120 if IN$="E" and val(ROOMS$(X+1,Y))>0 then X=X+1
130 if IN$="W" and val(ROOMS$(X-1,Y))>0 then X=X-1
140 if IN$="S" and val(ROOMS$(X,Y+1))>0 then Y=Y+1
150 if IN$="G" then gosub 2000 : rem get
160 if IN$="U" then gosub 3000 : rem use
170 if IN$="D" then gosub 4000 : rem drop
180 if IN$="K" then gosub 5000 : rem kill
190 if IN$="Q" then print "Goodbye!" : end
200 goto 50
900 :
1000 rem ROOM LAYOUT
1010 data 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0
1020 data 0,1,0,0,1,0,0,1,0,0
1030 data 0,1,0,0,1,0,0,1,0,0
1040 data 0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0
1050 data 0,0,0,1,1,1,0,1,0,0
1060 data 0,0,0,1,1,0,0,1,0,0
1070 data 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0
1080 data 0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,0,0
1090 data 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0
1100 data 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0
2000 :
2010 rem GET OBJECT
2020 print obj$
2040 wait key
2900 return
3000 :
3010 rem USE OBJECT
3020 print obj$
3040 wait key
3900 return
4000 :
4010 rem DROP OBJECT
4020 print obj$
4040 wait key
4900 return
5000 :
5010 rem KILL CHARACTER
5020 print obj$
5040 wait key
5900 return
10000 :
10010 rem ROOM DATA
10020 for r=0 to 100
10021 read desc$
10022 roomdesc$(r)=desc$
10023 next r
10024 return
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10154 data "West Room "
10155 data "Start room"
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10165 data "Room 65 "
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I wrote one of these for both my C64 and Amiga 500. Writing a parser was great fun. I learnt so much from that.