An Ocean Sheathed in Steel

So, in my infinite wisdom and foresight, I figured that if I wanted to get into the game business, preferably engine and basic game framework design, I’d better start doing that. So I am. I’m starting very small, because I want it to be a project I enjoy, and I’m using what I know. Which is mainly Java. It’s going to be a text-based dungeon crawler, prospecively titled Crawl. Like a toned-down version of the old puzzle/fantasy PC games. You know. “You are in a room. The door is locked. There is a flask with a green liquid in it, and a stool. What do you do?” Right now I don’t really want it to be uber hard and complicated, so freedom of choice is nil. I’m providing the user with their choices. I’ve got a basic combat system in place.

What I’m hung up on is the dungeon. Specifically the room design, and how I’m going to store the dungeon’s data. Right now, my rooms are their own separate class. Each with variables that every room will have. Example: Boolean hasMonster, String roomText (the basic text for the room, basically what I said above. You are in a room….etc.) In order to create a room, I do something like Room room2 = new Room(true, false, “You are in a room…”, etc etc.)

What really hangs me up are when I want to put puzzles into the room. What do I do? This will require custom Strings containing the puzzle, and Strings containing the possible answers, and an instance of Comparable and BufferedReader so that I can read in from the keyboard and compare it to the aforementioned strings.

And assuming I solve the puzzle conundrum, then how do I save my final dungeon design? Do I output it into a savefile, and then read from it every time I run the game? Or do I hardcode it into the game, which makes for fewer files, but possibly blockier code?

I’m going to use this journal pretty much as a sounding board. If you feel the need to comment, go ahead. But this is also how I work. By whining and listing all of my problems somewhere, it forces me to think them through, and I get things done. So no, I’m not necessarily demanding or expecting help or expecting comments on this. Just by writing it, I’m helping myself.