Hi I've been given the task of making a text based game much like the world of zuul game (1970's) if anyone remembers. If anyone knows about this it will be alot easier. But the game is basically just about navigating through a series of rooms. What I want to ask is, If I want to make the game sort of story based, with characters and interacting items, what is the best approach? When I say story based, I mean that after certain goals and criteria are met then the game appears to 'progress'. For instance I have a dialog that prints to the terminal upon entry to a new room. What I'd like to do is have the standard dialog for a room change if an action has been completed. To show some type of difference in status. ATM I'm thinking of just having boolean expressions to define when things change (e.g. when x = true then the dialog for RoomA is "blah blah", otherwise it is "abc" or something) Is this a good way to do it? Or should I have a numerical representation of the state of the game (Using a load of if statements referring to a 'state' variable to determine which dialog to print to the terminal? This is using JAVA btw... Thanks for any help. [Edited by - Souljah on March 5, 2006 5:42:28 AM]

You will want to use OOP based concepts and I would define the rooms via XML. Your game engine would read the "current" room, process the input and then move to the next room. The system would also handle any items gained or lost probally with an inventory vector/flags.

Stay away from a linear approach where you have to define everything with thousands of if statements. A key to remember is to design the system so eventually you can add to the game without adding anymore code. Keep your game engine and logic seperate and you should be fine.

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