Text Quest: A Low/No Code Approach to Game Design

Background

text quest is an open source game engine for running text-based adventure games; using a low/no code approach to game design.

A list of available games can be found on the text quest home page. You can also read more about the games in detail in the games section (be careful - spoilers alert!).

Motivation

Text quest was create to:

Inspire creative story writing (without images, CGI or video)
Create a low/no code solution for building games (using YAML)
Bootstrap something as quickly as possible to test the above (and not get bogged down with tooling, libraries and frameworks)
Provide a little escapism during these unusual times

Game Design

Games are defined using YAML. A sample game can be seen below, it contains the game, player, powers and single block (See: concepts for more detail):

game:
  name: Single Room Example Game
  version: 1.0
  description: Use commands to in a single room
  author: <a href="https://github.com/desholmes">Des Holmes</a>
  intro: '"Where am I?!?, maybe I should <b>look</b> around."</p>'

player:
  name: "Des"
  block: entrance
  bag:
  powers:
  blockHistory:

powers:
  help:
    description: "help: Lists your powers and any hints."
  look:
    description: "look: Use `look` for a description of your surroundings."
  powers:
    description: "powers: List the powers you have unlocked."

blocks:
  ######
  # SINGLE ROOM
  ######
  entrance:
    state: default
    states:
      default:
        name: "Single room"
        description: "You're in a single room game, nothing much to see in here."

Concepts

Here’s an overview of the core concepts within a games:

Blocks: A block represents a single location within the game. A block can have:
- exits: Connections to other blocks
- states: Variations for a block state (containing exits, actions, items)
- items: Items which are ‘visible’ from within a block state
- actions: Actions which can be performed by the player within a block state, and actions which can be triggered automatically based on what a player is carrying
Game: The name, version and author for the game
Player: The name, current block location, powers and items they are carrying
Powers: Descriptions for powers a player can unlock (not listed here, as they are part of the game)
Items: Descriptions for items which the player can carry, or can be found in a block