Quest Command

An Open World RPG Experienced through the Command Prompt

About

• Inspired by Elder Scrolls, Runescape, BOTW
• Sacrifice GUI for more varied in game interactions

Vision

• Living world - Elder Scrolls
• Composable AI - Oblivion, Skyrim
• Large world with composable level of detail - Daggerfall
• Go anywhere: climbing, swimming, gliding, teleporting - Morrowind, BOTW
• Dynamic dialogue - Event[0]
• Deep level of interaction - Runescape, Skyrim
• Allow batch files to force out grinding
• Convenient and forgiving commands
• Start with as much interaction as possible in a single small area

Pitfalls and Concerns

• Secret coupling
• Mental Scope (Lack of modularity / having to understand too much of the app at once)
• Inconsistency (string names etc)
• Slow content addition

Code Organization

• Lasagna vs Ravioli Packages
  • Still not happy with it
• Monolith vs Microservices
  • Dependencies too tightly coupled
  • Not getting microservice benefits

Event Driven

• Command
  • Parses user intent and posts an event
• Event
  • What is happening
• Listener
  • Many listeners can listen to events
  • Change app state
  • Output to the user
  • Post more events

Reflection

• Commands, Events, Listeners
• Originally used reflection at runtime
• Then created text files to be read at runtime
• Then created kotlin files that are compiled at compile time

Playground

• 15 Minutes
• Everyone plays the game on their laptop
• Interactive QA - setup and tech support
• Write long questions down for later

Walking through a command

• Look (defaults to tree)
• Look bucket (look with >1 choices)
• Look (present options)
• Ls

Minimum Viable Detail

• Reasonable defaults with scalable level of detail
• Json Inheritance and composition
• Behavior/tag driven instead of specific methods on objects

Different ways I’ve tested

• Unit
• Integration
• Performance
• Statistics
• Data Validations
• Mocking and Dependency Injection debug at get-default, objects

Objects

• Essentially a singleton
• Super convenient for managers
• Dangerous because they are singletons
• Dependency Injection

Misc

• Objects, Classes, and Pure functions - when to use each?
• TDD - When I’ve decided to use or not use it

Feedback

Please take a minute to fill out the survey!