Title:    Words as Objects Text Adventure! (a bit on the nose working title)
Date:    Feb 17
Type:    Digital Game. Playable Here
Role:    Design & Programming
Description: Made over the course of a week as a prototype, this is a short text adventure game testing a new mechanic. Words themselves can be ripped from the room descriptions and placed into your inventory. Then they can be combined to form new words, and then used to affect the environment. It otherwise is a simple adventure, with a small gauntlet of puzzles leading to an victory room.

In some text adventures, a key mechanic is carefully reading room descriptions for hints about exits or objects to be manipulated. This game plays with that conceit, as it’s the verbiage of the room descriptions themselves which are the potential objects. This creates a strange way of parsing the text, as actual semantic meaning must be separated from the constituent words of the text.

Building it was an interesting challenge, and constructing a text parser from scratch in a short time period is definitely tough! The resulting parser is quite simplistic as a consequence. The mechanic is a bit strange, but compels unusual play where the actual room descriptions need to be read with a magpie-like eye for word combinations.