#text parser

Hugo's House of Horrors - Exhibit #61

Greetings, Dreamers!

This week I've got a delightfully creepy story for you.

Ruby Quest, by tgweaver!

Reader discretion advised, this being a horror story and all.

I started a course in programming java recently and I knew a decent amount of Javascript before so I’ve been messing with weird ways of using what we've cover as I go. One really fun thing I started to do was make text scrambling functions. These would mostly do things like randomly capitalising letters, replacing a character with some punctuation symbol or adding duplicates of existing characters. One thing I liked when I played with this was how it seemed to give the text a personality, where it came off a certain way when iit enDeddd uuupp bBbeeingg ssperrr ddisstrttED.

I thought that would be a good way to depict unusual speech patterns in an dynamically random way that's only really possible in games. So I wondered about making use of it in a game. It reminded me of a machine breaking down, so then I decided I wanted to try make a game where a machine is trying to communicate with you as it’s breaking down. The machine has no idea what is happening to it but its text that displays information to you deteriorates over time, and you have to do your best to penetrate the communication barrier and give the computer commands that will solve its issue, before it’s too late to understand anything that comes out of it.

I don’t know that much about how I’ll structure the actual arc of the gameplay and challenge, but I have ideas about the tone and how you play. It’ll be a text parser, where it skims what you type for relevant keywords that it can act upon. Those are always messy and unreliable but I figure that it works in my favour here. The main intent behind it is to do my best to let the player type responses in whatever way they feel like and get a new answer that’s somehow relevant, but because it is the challenge of the game the onus is actually on the player to make themself understood (as opposed to the other way around, where the designer must make it seamless).