The Little Book Of Adventure Game Programming: Program Retro Text Adventures in C# (and other languages)

Write a retro text-adventure!

Learn the lost arts of the game implementers as Huw Collingbourne (author of the cult adventure game, The Golden Wombat Of Destiny) explains exactly how to write an exploring-style adventure game. All the source code can be downloaded from from the Bitwise Books web site (www.bitwisebooks.com).

The Little Book Of Adventure Game Programming provides a step-by-step guide to creating a game in C#, which is one of the most important languages on Windows and is also available on macOS and Linux. The programming principles and techniques explained in the book can also be used to write adventure games in other languages such as Java, Ruby or Object Pascal. Short examples (source code also available for download) are provided in those languages. As well as teaching adventure games specifically, this book can also be used as a tutorial to writing C# programs. It covers all the most important features of the C# language.

• How to write Interactive Fiction (IF) games
• Creating class hierarchies
• How to create a map of linked 'rooms'
• Moving the player around the map
• Adding treasures to rooms
• How to take and drop treasures
• Putting objects into containers (sacks, treasure chests etc.)
• Using lists and dictionaries
• Overridden methods
• Overloaded methods
• How to save and load games
• Designing a game with a user interface
• Designing a command-line game to run at the system prompt
• ...and much more

Whether you are new to programming or an old hand, this book will challenge you to expand your programming expertise while coding a really fun programming project. The programming topics covered include: list structures and dictionaries, streaming and serialization, object hierarchies, constructors, exception-handling, enums, generics and much more. This book may also complement standard C# tutorials (such as our other title, The Little Book Of C#) by taking you through the development of a complex project containing multiple source code files, partial classes and collections of objects.

Huw Collingbourne has been a programmer for more than 30 years. As well as writing text adventure games, he is an online programming instructor who has taught tens of thousands of students to code in languages such as Ruby, C, C#, Java and Object Pascal. He has written programming columns for numerous computer magazines such as PC Plus and Computer Shopper. He is Technical Director of the independent development company, SapphireSteel Software. He is the author of a number of programming books including The Little Book Of C, The Little Book Of C#, The Little Book Of Pointers and The Little Book of Recursion.

The Little Book Of Adventure Game Programming gives you just the stuff you really need to get straight to the heart of text adventure programming without all the fluff and padding.