If Text Then Code

  • About the Course
    • Course Goals
    • Course Modules
  • Important Information
    • Contact Me
    • Policies
  • Schedule
  • Assignments
    • Reflection Posts
      • Prompt #1
      • Prompt #2
      • Prompt #3
    • “Found Text” Abstracts
    • Build Your Own Website
    • Write Your Own Text Adventure Game
    • Publish Your Own Digital Edition
    • Final Project
    • Rubrics
  • Resources
    • Readings
    • Tool Kit
    • Tutorials & Exercises
  • Reflections

Build Your Own Text Adventure- First Post

September 26, 2016 by Matt Fay

Our text adventure will be one that allows the user to choose their own super power and use it to go on an adventure.  The super powers will be the gift of flight, super strength, or invisibility.  This will allow the user to go down three different paths.  The narratives for each journey will be different.  The flight super power will require the user to complete a trip to Russia to steal a prized government possession that is hidden atop a mountain.  The super strength power will entail a fight against terrorists in California.  The invisibility cloak will lead the user on a path to steal important government documents.  We will use probability in our code to make the game both structured and random.

screen-shot-2016-09-25-at-11-40-52-pm

Our idea to give the user three different options was thought of after we did the reading by Rettburg.  He talks about using collective knowledge as well as collaboration in literature.  There can be one author writing one chapter and another author writing the next.  This leads to a different type of story for the reader as it gives them something to look forward to as well as adding nuance to the syntax.  We are doing this by each creating our own branch of the game.  All of us will have a different interpretation of the journey that the characters will undertake, which will lead to a different experience for all the players.

image1The photo to the left is a very simple map of the direction that we want this adventure to go in.  We plan on making each different story as intricate as possible to make the code that we use something that the user doesn’t even think about.

Filed Under: Reflection #1

Partners In Crime

September 26, 2016 by Ella Ekstrom

Ambiguity. Mystery. History. Those three words define the foundation on which our project will be constructed. However, in contrast to the typical crime-solving structure, it will be a crime-creating game. As the player, you have graduated from Bucknell University and are desperate for work. You have two best friends, Neo, the com-sci engineer, and Christopher, the history major. After following a suspicious series of events, you three are prompted to “follow the whale” and, in doinbean-1997-rowan-atkinson-9g so, ultimately end up in a gang located in Hong Kong, with a mission to steal a major artifact from the museum. Throughout the game, as you are evading the law and completing dangerous missions, your deeper motivation will be to uncover the true motive behind the orders given to you and the root cause behind it all.

The focus of our game is mainly placed on the series of interactions between members of the gang and authority figures, with the missions being merely background tasks that just help to tie the story together. This relates to the idea in Literary Gaming that “in computer games and gaming as literary art, narrative, dramatic, and/or poetic techniques are employed in order to explore the affordances and limitations of rules and other ludic structures and processes,” (“Introduction,” Literary Gaming). We plan on creating a game that is driven by context and conversation—with suspicion laced onto each action described and an ambiguous motive behind every statement—with stimulating puzzles and secretive missions mixed in. Using terms from Literary Gaming, the core gaming strategy we therefore will use would be that of “cognitive ludicity,” (i.e. cognitive reading strategy), with “ergodic ludicity” (i.e. physical interaction with the software) and “ludic mechanics” (i.e. videogame-inspired technology such as winning and losing mechanics) as secondary forces. Essentially, we wish to involve the player’s mind more so than their keyboard when striving to win.

The greatest benefit of working in collaboration is that of the added creativity and collective skill that comes along with it. From our first brainstorming session, I witnessed the creative spark that spread like wildfire, lighting a myriad of inspired ideas almost effortlessly. Everyone focuses on and notices different things, so by adding other perspectives, you are able to illuminate aspects of the project that you might have otherwise overlooked if solo. However, with new perspectives also comes the possibility of contradicting perspectives, which could end up being counterproductive. Yet, disagreement can allow for further growth by which the best sides of each idea might be molded into a newer and better idea. In our group, each person has his or her own personal flair. My own niche tends to be one concerning the design and aesthetic of something, whereas Neil’s would be in the creativity and smoothness of the story, and given Dale’s experience with Python, his focus would be within the coding.

unnamed-1For me, I was greatly inspired by the “Open Sorcery” game I played during class. Despite its seemingly simple structure of providing textual context and then asking for the player choice of response, the compelling storyline added a vivacity that glowed through the unassuming text. It also incorporated riddles as a means of succeeding at a task, which I loved. These qualities are what I wish to construct our game with. Other inspirations for our game include The Matrix, such as “follow the whale” in comparison to “follow the rabbit,” and one of the main character’s names being Neo (which also sounds suspiciously similar to the name Neil).

Filed Under: Reflection #1, Reflections Tagged With: ambiguity, history, Mystery

The Thrill of the Heist

September 26, 2016 by Dale Hartman

The project my team and I are working on is an extension of the classic heist story, where a character must make their way through a secure facility to steal something of great value.  There is some universal appeal to a heist,  and we feel that it ties in very nicely with some of the standard ‘choose your own adventure’ cornerstones.  Specifically, we plan on tying in elements of mystery and puzzle-solving in order to make our story engaging.    Our story focuses on a recent college graduate and his two friends, who get involved with a museum heist.  One of the other graduates will serve as a kind of coordinator, and will be our tool for passing important information on to the player that their character would otherwise not know.  The other is kind of the ‘inside man,’ and will challenge our player to keep another person in mind when they are making their decisions.  Our story paths are going to branch out quite a bit, which I feel cements the validity of our story as a work of interactive fiction as defined in Literary Gaming.  The introduction stresses that interactive fiction “would lose something of its aesthetic and semiotic function if it were removed from [the digital] medium.”  We can’t reflect the branching story and puzzles we wish to create through a static medium.

 

Mystery is a challenging sensation to create in a text adventure.  We want the player to be drawn into the story, and for them to want to continue in order to reach the conclusion.  However, if we leave the player confused and unsure of what’s going on, it’ll have the opposite effect.  We can’t really use visuals or other media to get our point across.  Literary Gaming, defined literary video games as experiences where verbal components are the foreground.  One of the methods we are using to mitigate this confusion is providing distinct choices to the player every time they need to provide input.  Under the hood, every text adventure game has this going on.

A screenshot from Open Sorcery. Every bit of text in red is a button, which is the player's method of gaining information and progressing the story
A screenshot from Open Sorcery. Every bit of text in red is a button, which is the player’s method of gaining information and progressing the story

For every fork in the road, there are only so many paths you can take.  The program will only be able to understand and act upon the specific responses it’s programmers expected and coded in at that location.  We plan to turn that into an asset for the player.  By showing them those choices, we can be sure the player will not be lost simply because they can’t find the words we expected them to type in at that location.  Our group got this idea from one of the Case Studies we played: ‘Open Sorcery.’  This text adventure game took user input by turning specific words in the display text into the choices.  While playing this game, I was never lost as to what I could do, but I also never felt like I was being constrained by the choices available.

 

 

Our group is working together very well so far.  The overall idea for the story came out of the time we spent in class brainstorming.  We did a great job of building off of each other’s ideas in order to get to the semi-final story we have now.  I am the most experienced coder in the group, so my #1 focus is going to be the difficult parts of the game code.  Ella and Neil have been focused more on the writing.

A helper function to get player choices. Functions like this help keep the logic code of the game clean, and prevent retyping similar lines of code over and over.
A helper function to get player choices. Functions like this help keep the logic code of the game clean, and prevent retyping similar lines of code over and over.

However, as the project continues, we will all mix around and I predict each of us will work on all parts of the project.  As of right now, I’ve been working on a few Python functions to serve as helpers when we are writing out the full code of the story.

Filed Under: Reflection #1, Reflections Tagged With: Adventure, Crime, python, Story

EscapeTheMaze.py – Reflection #1

September 26, 2016 by Jingya Wu

Our project a basically a maze combined with room-escaping game, with narrative associated to it to make the background richer and more attractive to the players. We haven’t really decided completely on what the narrative would be, but we have roughed out a character who suddenly find him/herself in the middle of a set of strange rooms and is trying to get out of the place through a door located at one end of the rooms. The conflicts we were building for the character include a variety of challenges and traps that need to be solved in order to get the hints and tools to escape. The room connected to the final door will be locked, in order to find the key, player will need to go through each of the other room, in a carefully planned order based on the hints he/she will receive. Otherwise, the player might be trapped, and this can happen in a variety of ways. For instance, there will be a fierce dog in one of the rooms, and the player will be warned by a danger sign as well as a sentence like, “You are approaching the door and you hear the barking from a starving dog.” The player will then want to make sure he/she has gotten the necessary tools (a delicious bone in this case) in hand before entering these dangerous rooms.

It is extremely important to think about the way that we are conducting the information to the readers/players of our text game. Just like mentioned in the New Narratives, we are currently transitioning to a digital age, where hypertext is becoming more and more popular and powerful than the traditional printed books. Our text adventure game kind of lies in the middle ground of the constructive and the exploratory hypertext. The players won’t be able to modify the overall structure of the game, that is, the rules of the game is fixed, and this is the exploratory aspect of the game. However, the player will “develop a body of information which they map according to their needs, their interests, and the transformations they discover as they invent, gather, and act upon that information”, which makes the text adventure game a constructive narrative as the same time.

In our team, Jake is an Economics major as well as the only native English speaker, and thus is a better communicator than Duoyang and me, so he will probably be writing more about the narrative and the text for the background story. Duoyang is an Electrical Engineering major, and is good at planning the storyline and the logic behind the scene, and thus will be doing more of the storyline planning. As a Computer Science and Engineering major, I really enjoy and am good at coding, thus I am very happy to contribute more to the programming part of the game and try to see how we can make the game more interactive and visually appealing to the players from the coding perspective. There are lots of benefits of working collaboratively in a group of three. Since the three of us come from different backgrounds and fields, we have a variety of expertise and thus can cover each other’s weakness. In addition, while we are trying to make everyone do some of everything (planning the storyline, writing the narrative, programming the game, etc), we can learn from each other and improve ourselves in the areas that we were not as good at as the other two. However, it is sometimes challenging to make all three of us make similar contributions in every aspect of the game, as we always tend to stay in our comfort zones and only do what we feel comfortable doing.

Below is a sketch of the storyline of our text adventure game:

img_20160922_105511

Filed Under: Reflection #1, Reflections Tagged With: digital humanities, maze, text adventure game

Reflection

September 25, 2016 by Neil Lin

In 2022, the player and two other students who have graduated from Bucknell University for two years. The set of another two virtual characters is for giving advice and help to the player, then the player could decide which of guide he or she may follow. The background is about implementation of the TPP, Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which was signed by US government in 2018. The economy situation gets worse and worse for the tremendous decrease in exports and imports for this act, and the unemployment rate gets another highest level comparing to the Great Depression. The three main characters are struggling in living for both student loan and hyperinflation. At this time, all three go back to Bucknell campus, seeking for any job that might be available. They accidentally find a letter lying in the mailbox they used to use. After playing number guessing game, they finally open the mailbox. The letter says: “follow the whale”. They start a journey to work for a gang in Hong Kong to steel an artifact in a museum to make money. The main conflicts are to avoid being noticed for example choose a discreet movement, and to open the safe case using Caesar cipher.

Due to the definition of “exploratory hypertext” by Joyce,  which means the text itself is changing every time with the reader’s reaction. This functions on our project. The player should read the instructions and understand the facial expressions of virtual people. Then he or she might give a corresponding action whether to pass by or to talk to them naturally to cover his or her identity as a thief. “Collaborations are both the work itself and the series negotiations between collaborators that govern the work’s creation.” (Rettberg, P194) Our game ,just like collective work, needs a lot of collaborations between the player and the other two virtual characters which are set by code. While we communicate by codes and series of texts and choices.

There are many benefits to work in Group 2. I am a first-year and this is definitely the first time I deal with computer science, and Dale has experienced a lot with Python, so he is the main director of codes. Ella and I are in charge of thinking and modifying the main story line and writing the text in the game. While, the biggest challenge for me to work collaboratively is to understand what the concept they were talking about. The cultural difference is unavoidable for example when we were brainstorming, they could easily talk about hundreds of movies that I have never heard of before. While finally, we didn’t apply any one of them and agreed with the story now it looks like.

The whole idea is inspired by the game I played during class called “Sherlock Holmes and the Indecipherable Cipher” in playfic.com. So we also put some other virtual characters to give some clues to the player, decreasing the difficulty of the game and directing him or her to what is supposed to do, other than doing a lot of codes to cover every possibilities. Also “follow the whale” and the character’s name “Neo” are inspired by the movie “The matrix”. “Follow the whale” gives the player the direction and clue what he or she needs to do next and shifts the set location to Hong Kong. But why Hong Kong? It is just for the reason that based on my knowledge Hong Kong is the right place to steel artifacts and breeds lots of gang.

tumblr_m9mo6g8tgn1rt0pczo1_1280downloadwc_yzscz_400x400stock-photo-the-trench-run-54952580

The game is going to be reality.

Filed Under: Reflection #1, Reflections Tagged With: #literature, digital humanities, gaming, reflection

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • Next Page »

HUMN 271

Bertrand 012
TR 9:30-11:20am
Dr. Diane Jakacki

Authors

  • Dale Hartman RSS feed
  • Diane Jakacki RSS feed
  • ejp013 RSS feed
  • Ella Ekstrom RSS feed
  • jaa023 RSS feed
  • Jingya Wu RSS feed
  • Julia Wigginton RSS feed
  • Matthew Fay RSS feed
  • Matthew Lucas RSS feed
  • Neil Lin RSS feed
  • Peter Onusconich RSS feed
  • Sarah Rosecky RSS feed
  • Tong Tong RSS feed
  • Xing Fu RSS feed
  • Yash Mittal RSS feed

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License Bucknell University Humanities 271 Course by Diane Jakacki is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Copyright © 2023 · eleven40 Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in