Ever-Changing Mansion

This is a procedurally generated text adventure game created for PROCJAM 2016. It's rather a concept proof, than a real game.

If the native version of the game doesn't work for you, you can try an ugly and glithy HTML version (password: html).

Although I call it a "text adventure", it's closer to "escape games" than to classic text adventure games such as Zork. What's the difference? Classic adventure games more heavily rely on story and understanding how their game world works. Escape games are more mechanical and sometimes they don't have a story at all.

---

How to play

In this game you find yourself locked in a weird house and your goal is to get out from there. There are no hazards and no hostile NPCs, but most of the doors are locked this way or another and you need to find means to unlock them. Using simple text commands you can operate items and navigate rooms. For example: "take key", "open backpack", "inventory", "use crowbar on door", "go to greenhouse". You can ignore articles and in some cases you can use "it" as a reference to the last mentioned object.

---

How it works

For each game session a new random "mansion" is created. The mansion is a set of interconnected rooms. Between some rooms you can navigate freely, connections between others are initially "locked". After creating this graph of rooms keys for the locked doors are placed in such way that the game is always solvable, i.e. a key is never placed behind a door it opens. That's basically all, but to make it a little less trivial some number of "containers" are added to the mansion. For example instead of a key on the ground you can encounter a key inside a backpack inside a chest. Some containers also get locked and the keys for them are placed similarly to keys for doors. Currently the list of doors and items is very short. Making it longer would help to make the game more interesting. Because of a small number of existing items the number of rooms is also made small to avoid creating empty meaningless locations.

---

Further development

Here is a list of things I'm going to implement in this version of the game:

• Variations of keys for doors and containers i.e. in different games the same lock will be opened differently.
• Combining items i.e. instead of placing a key for a lock its parts will be placed.
• Better commands parser to understand commands "do smth and do smth" e.g. "take backpack and open it".
• Adding game objects without rebuilding the game by editing external files. That actually is almost done.
• More rooms, items and possible interactions between them.

---

About a year ago @Arcnor and I tried to implement this idea of a procedurally generated adventure game as a more traditional graphic adventure game. It was a fail more or less, because it required a huge (as it seemed to me) amount of graphics. Now I think that it's actually quite doable, we just need to consider carefully how it should look. So probably this project will reincarnate as a point and click adventure game someday.

Made with Haxe + OpenFL