So I made this text adventure game in a console application, but now I want to add a simple GUI to it, what do?
I made a text adventure game but I want a GUI for it.
First decide how you're wanting to make your GUI. Like, what all kinds of features you want it to have and stuff. You could make it into a Windows application if you wanted, though it's a bit ugly for an adventure. If you wanted to create your own system with lots of pictures and stuff, look into different graphics libraries, make your graphics, and build a little display. You'll have to alter your program but you should be able to leave a lot in tact. I would "start from scratch" and then copy over the parts that you need, as long as you know it will all work out in the end.
I'd go with winforms. It's a bit old, but so easy to control...
Just start up the visual studio, start a winform project, and mostly just drag and drop controls. You'll have an application running in no-time.
If you have any questions about winforms - feel free to ask. I'm sure there'll be a lot of people here willing to help.
Author
I want to keep the text adventure in, so I want a console but with a little GUI on the side showing health and other stats instead of just typing it out.
EDIT: I'm using CobeBlocks
You can use a windows form and just turn the background black and make text color green to give it the console "feel". As Shay said, if you use visual studio express making a form is as easy as drag and drop. Depending on how you went about writing the original game, you may find much of your original code can still be used.
The consoles should be able to handle ASCII which is a means of encoding colors and symbols to add visual flare to text based console apps. This is how things like shell connections make the colored and highlighted text but as we have recently seen in another post this can lead to much much more. Check out "Retro Owl's" ASCII RPG to get an idea of what ascii can do...
http://www.gamedev.net/topic/638662-whispers-in-the-moss-the-ascii-rpg/
To get started simply get on your search machine and look up "ASCII Coding in C++" or whatever your language of choice is. It may require quite a bit of rewrite to your printing patterns if you don't already have the margin space available. Good key thing to note about ASCII is you can print it AFTER the content and simply reposition the character to the row & column to add in the GUI elements. Working with ascii is simply printing out special command strings to the ASCII compliant console.
This topic is closed to new replies.
Advertisement
Popular Topics
Advertisement