📼 Final Project Update 📼

A lot of my work in the past two weeks has involved a) chasing what makes me passionate in this project and b) learning to scale my project into meaningful goals that are achievable. Originally, I wanted an entire text-based adventure that uses natural language processing to parse user input. My project partner kindly let me know that I was biting off more than I could chew, and in hindsight I completely agree.

I found myself scaling my project down from an entire apartment to an escape room, and realized that instead of using natural language processing I should start with menu options. I want to work on developing a long-term text-based game outside of class over break, so this project is good practice to figure out a text-based adventure without the added pressure of teaching myself the whole new skill of NLP.

While working, I often found myself getting derailed and spending a lot of time on the parts of the game that I was passionate about, for example, creating a mastermind minigame for players to flip lightswitches. Instead of shutting down those passions and pressuring myself to stick to a rigid “perfect” game, I allowed myself to explore and chase my interests, for example, a mini mastermind game!

🔓 Mastermind Progress 🔑

Here are different versions recording progress on my mastermind mini-game. I spent a lot of my time challenging myself to take a randomly generated string of 1’s and 0’s and convert it to X’s and O’s for a cleaner user interface. I could have had the user guess using 1’s and 0’s, but what’s the fun in that! My commentary in each step gives insight into my headspace while coding; I’ll go more into depth in my final code writeup detailing the struggles of getting this to work!

First try:

Second try:

Third try:

If I have time, I’d love to develop the mini-game to tell the user things like “you have four correct switches, two are in the right spot,” because at the moment it just says “you have two correct switches.”

👛 Inventory 👛

I also took some time to briefly set up an inventory where players can “pick up” items and set them down. I need to refactor this, but I have the bare-bones down.

👾 Goals 👾

1. Readdress my interface (which hasn’t changed too much from week one)
2. Create two more master-mind-like puzzles for the user to solve
3. Refactor the inventory actions and create working functions that clean up the code
4. Put everything together in a concrete story line (where people have to solve three puzzles and get three items in order to escape the room)
5. Write a reflective report!