An Adventure Authoring System

11/27/21, 9:53 PM An Adventure Authoring System David Betz An Adventure Authoring System A tour of AdvSys, a tool for writing text adventure games [Editor's note: “Interactive Fiction as Literature,” a companion piece to this article, begins on page 135.] AdvSys is a system I designed for writing text adventure games. In adventure games, the player acts as an adventurer in a simulated world (real or imaginary). Players determine their own course of action by typing commands that trigger events in the simulated world. You can approach the writing of an adventure game in many ways, and a number of books describe how to use traditional programming languages to write adventures. The most commonly used language is BASIC. But while you can certainly build very complex and interesting adventures using BASIC, it was not designed specifically for that purpose. Much of the task of building an adventure game program consists of constructing complex data structures that model the game universe. BASIC has no convenient means for describing these data structures. Even Pascal, which is rich in data structuring facilities, has no easy means of constructing complex initialized data structures. Another approach to writing adventures is to use a special language specifically designed for the purpose. This article describes such a language. A language for writing adventures must have three essential features: a parser to handle commands typed by the player, an object-description facility, and a language for specifying the events that take place in response to the players' commands. The Parser Adventure games generally take place in a The parser is responsible for prompting the player to enter a command. It world made up of a must read the command from the keyboard and break it into pieces that can be network of digested by the action code. All commands are broken into one of five interconnected different types of phrases: 'locations.' 1. an actor phrase 2. a verb phrase 3. a list of direct-object noun phrases 4. a preposition 5. an indirect-object noun phrase Not all of these phrases are present in every command, and the parser recognizes only a li…