Okay, so, I got this idea to create a text-based adventure game, and I thought, “Hey, ‘The Frosts of Icewrack’ sounds pretty cool, right?” So I started, like, totally from scratch.
First, I brainstormed. You know, just jotting down ideas. What kind of setting? Icewrack… obviously cold, snowy, maybe some mountains? I pictured a lone wanderer, maybe a disgraced knight or something, trying to survive. I decided, No magic, just raw survival and some old-fashioned sword fighting.
Then, I opened up a plain text editor. No fancy game engines, just good old Notepad. I started typing out the introduction, setting the scene. Something like, “The wind howls, biting at any exposed skin. Snow crunches under your worn boots…” You get the idea.
Next, I started coding the basic mechanics, using Python, cause it easy for beginner. Simple stuff. I made variables for the player’s health, inventory, location. Just numbers and lists, really.
- health = 100
- inventory = [“rusty sword”, “tattered cloak”, “dried meat”]
- location = “frozen_plains”
I created a bunch of “if” statements. Like, “if the player types ‘go north’, then change the location to ‘icy_cave’”. Loads of them. It got messy pretty fast, I used simple word.
I added some basic combat. Really basic. “If player types ‘fight wolf’, then subtract a random number from player’s health and wolf’s health”. No fancy animations, just text saying stuff like, “You swing your sword and hit the wolf!” or “The wolf bites you!”
I spent ages just adding more locations, more descriptions, more items. I made a rough map on a piece of paper to keep track of everything. It looked like a spiderweb after a while.
The Testing And Changes
Then came the testing. Oh boy. I played through the game myself, over and over. I got stuck in a cave, died from a surprisingly strong squirrel (I nerfed that squirrel, believe me), and generally found a million bugs. I fixed bugs, I fixed again.
I showed it to a friend. He found even more bugs. He also said the writing was “a bit dull”. Ouch. So I went back and tried to make the descriptions more exciting. More adjectives, more vivid verbs. Less “You see a tree”, more “A gnarled, frost-covered tree claws at the sky”.
Finally, after a lot of tweaking and fixing, I had something that was, well, playable. It’s not going to win any awards, but it’s mine. I created it, from nothing but an idea and a lot of typing. And that’s pretty cool, I think.
