Help with making randomly generated game in cmd

So, anyways, to state it simply, I have no idea. Idea about what? How to make a game. So, I need to complain a bit. I like playing the rpg, and all the games on here, and they inspired me to make my own game. Except, there’s one drawback. How do I make a game? What I’m trying to do is a cmd game, nothing complex. I want a randomly generated weight gain dungeon exploration game. The game that was the biggest push for me to say ‘Hey, Imma make a game’ was Food Fugitive. I want to figure out how to make that type of game, with of course my own storyline, and different mechanics. I just need to figure out the basics, like the randomization, and how to implement weight gain, and all the base mechanics. Thanks!

Maybe you could do this dungeon tutorial. And check out the Procedural Content Generation Wiki to figure out how to generate random dungeons.

Well, thanks, but I’m looking to make something bit simpler, like, a text game, in which you explore a randomly generated area, not necessarily a dungeon. I want to include events that could make you gain or lose weight, and perhaps effects, like curses, and spells, and I also want to work out battles.

I’m not entirely sure what you mean by a “cmd” game.

If you mean something like Food Fugative, you could write that in almost any programming language going so long as it can output text and read typed input. Take your pick! Of course this does mean learning a programming language, so you might want to pick one that will be useful in a wider scope, and one that will run on the variety of modern computers people use. Java (used for Food Fugative), python etc are obvious cross-platform choices. There’s nothing stopping you working in other languages if you are prepared to limit yourself to one platform (VisualBasic on Windows?).

If you don’t want to learn how to program, then you may want to look at Inform - the engine behind many of the classic computer adventures. At first sight it’s “code” looks like a pseudo-English series of statements about the world. You can find a fair few tutorials and videos out there. Be aware though that Inform is a kind of coding, it just doesn’t look like it. Sooner or later, like all English-like programming systems (4GLs) you will have to get to grips with the underlying concepts. The WG aspect will need you to be able to change the player character’s description, and this won’t be entirely trivial.

Then there are adventure building tools: Quest, RAGS, Renpy, DayDreamer, Twine. I’d say that Twine is the easiest to get started with.

Of course, you could be a glutton for punishment, and actually want to build your game in Windows cmd.exe scripting language! Don’t laugh, it’s probably achieveable. There was an infamous Unix “random dungeon” game built using that system’s (rather more expressive) scripting language. It was quite evil, making up room descriptions from the directories (folders) names and the items in the room from the files in the directory. So your “work” directory might be described as a “Dread portal lies to the North”, and if you went in there you might find your “important.txt” file described as a “Small brass lantern”. Picking the lantern up and wandering around with it actually moved the file, causing the people who had tried the game to cuss and swear when they couldn’t find things afterwards!

I’ve played a vore game (that had weight gain in it) built entirely in Excel. Even had music. Was actually pretty remarkable.

That’s certainly an interesting approach! I guess Excel has a lot of the things you’d need plus hooks into VB.

The very first text adventure I wrote was written in Z80 machine code. It all ran in about 750 bytes largely by subverting the minimal operating system to interpret the commands. I’m not claiming it was very good though. And also not an approach I’d recommend!

I think he means a program that receives input and output from a console window. You know, like Colossal Cave Adventure.

Well, yes, sort of. I want something like this game, http://www.furaffinity.net/view/18278200/ , and something like Food Fugitive. So, in my game, I want the character to get stronger as they gain. I want there to be events based off of the turn number, and the enemies also get harder the further you get into the dungeon. I want there to be events in which you have to choose the right choices, or risk losing weight. Unlike in food fugitive, I want the dungeon to be against in a way that it tries to make you lose weight, since that will also make you weaker. And, unlike in Food Fugitive, where once you get to a certain weight you’re screwed, I want the character to be able to think and wiggle out of tough situations, perhaps by even bargaining with the monster. As for coding: I’m looking for something simple, since my coding knowledge is at -0. Yes, I’d be willing to learn some coding, if it were simple, but nothing extremely hard.

With Mono, even VisualBasic is cross platform now. I’m not sure there is a main stream programming language that is truly exclusive to any platform anymore. Still, I wouldn’t recommend VisualBasic, especially not for a beginner. And there are some programming languages that require some real effort to port programs from one platform to another, or at least they used to. C and C++ are prime examples of this. But, on the other hand, if you are only creating a command-line game that reads input and creates output line-by-line, without requiring any kind of more advanced UI, then even C and C++ code is easily cross platform.

This sounds incredibly devious, and potentially devastating for an account on a Unix-like system. Do you happen to remember the name of the game? I kind of want to look it up.

So, simple/complex and easy/hard are subjective. It’s possible that you could look at extremely low level coding, assembly level coding, and think that it is incredibly simple and easy (if you’re curious, check out TIS-100 on Steam for a taste of what this would be like). It’s also possible that you could look at relatively high level scripting platforms, like what you would get in RPG Maker, and think that’s too complex for you. Nobody here, or anywhere, can judge that but you, and you’re just going to have to try things to see if you can get the hang of them.

Also, there is probably no way around learning to code and learning about more than just basic software development concepts if you want to create applications like what you’ve described. Creating something similar to that program on Fur Affinity will DEFINITELY require some work beyond the most basic coding, if only to create a similar user interface. If you want to make games, this isn’t something you can easily get around. Unless, of course, you can assemble a team where you design the game and your team creates the software and assets, but this requires a lot of work as well, just in a different area with different core competencies (i.e. management and creative design).

However, if you are willing to dive in, then probably your best bet is going to be to start with Python coding. I personally don’t like Python, but I’m an old-school programmer so I’m going to be very biased, and I know that Python has a lot going for it. It’s extremely popular, it’s extremely cross platform, there are a lot of resources online that will help you if you get stuck, and it’s very powerful. For instance, there are a bunch of tutorials online for Python. Here are the top three returns from a Google search, reproduced here because why the hell not?

https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/
https://www.tutorialspoint.com/python/

And here’s some reference material for Python:

https://docs.python.org/3/

As far as starting with something like Quest, Twine, Inform, or RPG Maker . . . yes, they could be of enormous benefit to you, but only if the game you are making matches very closely the kind of game they are meant to be used to create. While it is definitely possible to extend some of these platforms to handle more complicated games that don’t quite match, that still requires some fairly in-depth knowledge of software development concepts (and in some cases coding using horrible languages such as Javascript . . . I’M LOOKING AT YOU RPG MAKER) to properly implement your game idea. It sounds to me like the game you want to make would be very difficult to implement with one of the stock game engines.

If you are serious about wanting to develop this game, and I definitely encourage you to try because it can be extremely rewarding, then I would recommend Python. It has everything you will need (and a whole lot more), and learning to use it will teach you both basics and advanced concepts that you can use later to develop games on other, more specialized game development platforms.

|quietly hides away javascript-based modding support for his game|

A text game could be written in C and providing you stuck to the standard library functions would be easily cross platform. It would need re-compiling for each one though, which is probably not what Doggo-chan needs for his first game!

This sounds incredibly devious, and potentially devastating for an account on a Unix-like system. Do you happen to remember the name of the game? I kind of want to look it up.[/quote]

I did have a look around to see if it was out there, and ran across this, which is similar, but looks safer:

New Adventure Shell

It has links to the originals too:

Shells at IF Archive

I probably had a variant of one of those!

My programming language could beat up your programming language!

As for actually helping this guy out, maybe try Lua Text Adventure Engine? Although, perhaps not; it seems a little obtuse to someone like me.

My advice to you (and anyone just starting out) is to try a few things until you find one that works with your unique style.

In the interest of pointing the OP at an IDE which may be non-scary for someone with no programming experience I would suggest Inform7. http://inform7.com/

The syntax will drive you nuts if you’re experienced with literally any other programming language, because it is trying very hard to pretend it is natural language, but it might make dipping a toe in the programming pool a little more inviting.

(edit) Oh. Hah! Skimming back up I guess Dingotush already mentioned Inform. Oh well.