In any case the basic ideas involved are not too hard to grasp. That’s probably not true in the case of a text-adventure game. No guarantees whatsoever will be made regarding the actual playability of the final product! Since they say that a picture is worth more than a thousand words: I shan’t be too concerned with superfluous features and instead direct most energy towards nifty algorithms and reasonably well-designed data structures. We did attempt to implement a GUI for our program using xpce/library but was unable to due to bugs and the lack of workable solutions to fix it.As promised, in this and the following posts I’ll design and implement a simple, text-driven adventure game in the spirit of Zork. It is also hard to implement a Prolog-only GUI for our program due to the lack of support, and the fact that Prolog is usually used to query relations and databases. On the other hand, Prolog also excelled at adventure games, as unlike other languages which have concrete control-flows, which would force us to use multiple loops, Prolog has knowledge bases which allowed us to avoid this aspect. This was made more difficult by the fact that unlike our previous project, we started completely from scratch.

Even so, it was difficult to implement some of the systems, especially the stat system. Because of the topics covered in the course, which focused mainly on the logical side of prolog such as knowledge bases, this project allowed us to learn some of the more practical elements such as if-then-else. This project also allowed us to learn some of the more practical elements of prolog. ball moving across a screen) and Prolog cannot do that. We have learned that due to the nature of Prolog, it is almost impossible to create real-time games since it requires the program to change states very frequently (ie. We also wanted to make this project as moddable as possible so events and endings could be added or removed without tampering with other bits of code. These required the use of library(random). We also wanted to incorporate random events which have a small chance of occurring after each day. The first are those that are triggered when we reach a certain condition. We first incorporated this by making stat increases random. We also wanted to include events as a way to encourage both planning and adaptation. This requires being able to constantly update our knowledge base. In our adventure game, we are required to constantly update the player’s stats and be able to retrieve it when desired. The basic story is that the player has 30 days to train themselves in order to defeat the dragon before it attacks the village.

The game will have elements of time and stat management, as well as basic story-telling elements. We will be creating a rudimentary text-adventure game using Prolog. Authors: Yean Shu, Jason Ueng, Daniel Hou

Prolog adventure game source code