Last summer I spent a month blogging about basic programming, building stuff up out of small building blocks into bigger and bigger games. The exercise was modeled on some books I liked when I was a teenager and curious about programming.

The last game was a text adventure game. It became... big. More ambitious than I had planned.

It's not that it had that many rooms or was that long. It didn't even experience feature creep. It was just a fairly big and ambitious game. I finished it, but more than half a month after I had planned. In retrospect, it was insane to assume I would be able to write it in the last two days of that month of blogging. Dedicating a whole month to writing the adventure game would have been more appropriate.

So, that's what I will do. I will write exactly the same game over the scope of a month. Well, functionally it will be the same. The details of the implementation will be different. Better.

We will learn a lot together, dear reader. Things that got lost in a sea of details last year.

What's more, there are a couple of other advantages with doing this all over again:

There's a certain amount of artistic suffering in writing text descriptions and coming up with a plot and all that. Since I'll be doing the same game, I won't have to do that, I can just re-use everything from last year. Might put in the odd improvement, of course.

I realized last year that I really should have written this game with Test-Driven Development. I will this time around. Not only that, you will see the domain-oriented TDD that I prefer nowadays, and that really should be more well-known. This approach really makes you understand object orientation. At least that's the effect it has on me.

In retrospect, I don't think I should have leaned so hard on type system. I used roles a lot last year, like Openable . And then mixed them into classes, like Door . It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it does make the whole object model a little inflexible and, well, static. This year around I'll try something else, and I think it'll come out better and more dynamic, while at the same time more light-weight. I think you'll like it better.

There will be zillions of spoilers for the actual game. If you know a way to give a detailed public account of how to implement an open-source adventure game without giving away the whole plot, get in touch.

Until I conclude this blogging month, there will be an ongoing mini-contest known as "Devastate The Adventure Game". Basically, you download the game and run it on Rakudo. If at any point during its development you manage to get the game to behave outside of its intended parameters, you're in the contest. I want to hear about all instances of this, and I'll do my best to log them all publicly. The most insane, creative, simply up-the-wall fruit-bat bananas mis-use of the game (decided by me; any number of entries per person) wins an Amazon book worth about 50 EUR. Crazy stunts may get honorable mentions in the blog posts, too.

Suddenly this feels pretty exciting. 哈哈 Come on folks, nail the masakbot!

Oh, and I wrote a plan for the whole month. Subject to change, but the basic structure is hopefully there.

2012-07-01: describing the hanoi subgame; methods/events/exceptions

2012-07-02: implementing the hanoi subgame

2012-07-03: testing the adventure game, looking around

2012-07-04: moving around I (compass directions)

2012-07-05: moving around II (up/down, in/out)

2012-07-06: room descriptions (look)

2012-07-07: saving and restoring

2012-07-08: blocked exits

2012-07-09: things and descriptions

2012-07-10: things which can be opened

2012-07-11: things which contain other things

2012-07-12: platform things

2012-07-13: things which you can read

2012-07-14: hidden things which can be revealed

2012-07-15: things which can be carried around

2012-07-16: things which are part of the scenery

2012-07-17: getting things from the car (car, rope, flashlight)

2012-07-18: finding the door in the grass (grass, bushes, door)

2012-07-19: filling your car with leaves (trees, leaves)

2012-07-20: putting the leaves in the basket (sign, basket, walls)

2012-07-21: it's too dark in here! (can't see, turn on the flashlight)

2012-07-22: playing the hanoi game (walls, all the disks)

2012-07-23: being blocked by the fire (fire, walls)

2012-07-24: fetching water (brook, water, helmet)

2012-07-25: putting out the fire

2012-07-26: doom and cavern collapse

2012-07-27: triggering doom and dying (pedestal, butterfly, walls)

2012-07-28: moving around III (movement synonyms)

2012-07-29: verb synonyms

2012-07-30: tying up various loose ends

2012-07-31: the finished game

Stand by, blog post number one is already in the pipeline.