Sunday, October 16, 2011

Finished text-based adventure in Ruby

I'm now more or less done with the text dungeon I was building last week. I finished it up last night and fixed some bugs, refactored a bit and made the game more playable today. I also ran the code with -w, which shows a list of warnings. I'm not entirely clear how warnings differ from errors (other than errors stop the code, whereas warnings allow it to continue) but running the code this way allowed me to clean up bad indentation (plenty of it) as well as cleaning up a few other things. I also found out you can indent or unindent (is this a word?) a block of text in TextMate using keyboard shortcuts. Of course, I only found this out after getting frustrated at how long it took to manually indent or unindent a block of code. What's the lesson here? Sometimes it's not about learning new tools, but learning to be more efficient with the tools you already know. 

I've learned a lot with this little project: defining instance variables such as @brass_key, using instance variables to do things within other methods, such as opening doors, creating an inventory for the player that adds or subtracts items as they're found or used, logic to change events if certain instance variables were true and so on and so forth.


Tomorrow I plan to get back to work on Learn Ruby the Hard Way, but this week has definitely been well spent. I may revisit this project in the future and rewrite it to use case / while instead of if / elsif, but I'm ready to work on something new. I spend a lot less time flailing around and feeling stupid now and a lot more time coding or looking for ways to do what I want to do. 


My vocabulary is getting better, too, so it's easier to find information now. And all of this work makes me think about Manticore (don't worry, baby, I haven't forgotten about you!) and how much easier it'll be to redo now. The code I had before I sat down with Eli a few weeks ago took me a couple of months to write, and I'm pretty confident I can get the same functionality with less code in about a week now. But first I need to finish up Learn Ruby the Hard Way. 


And I've been thinking about using what I've learned to write tutorials. I'm sure other new Rubyists will be confused about local and instance variables, or how to write and call methods, and I'd like to try and write something up that will explain these basic ideas in the context of a text-based dungeon crawler. I haven't thought too much about it yet, but it's something I'd like to do in the future.


Here's a link to a gist of the game:

Dungeon of Unfathomable Horror