Complex game worlds, simple text interfaces (2015)
I&#x27;d love to know the &#x27;design patterns&#x27; of works like this Knights of San Francisco game. Did the author use a workflow engine, a rules engine, functional event sourcing, a nested pyramid of if-then-else doom?<p>I have a sense that this space is somewhat unexplored. Text-based game world simulation is a relatively underdocumented (to my eyes) form of the &#x27;game UI overtop a database manipulated with game logic rules&#x27; type of games, of which Simulation games are at the complex end of.<p>There are things like Twine and Inky that offer variables and conditionals to prewritten bodies of text, but doing composable texts worlds that change their state based on the accumulated choices of players over the course of their time seems to be a complex feature to build and extend, whether in Twine or another tool. Dialog simulation systems that remember what options you&#x27;ve done and give you additional options or changes over the course of the game are sold as products online. Heck, someone recently patented a &#x27;grudge&#x27; system that a popular game (League of Legends?) used.<p>Or maybe I&#x27;ve just been looking too closely at it. I&#x27;ve been working slowly for about the past 2 years on an automation system for a tabletop RPG (non D-20 system) to speed up battle generation &amp; resolution, trying to incorporate all of the various rules that say &#x27;in X scenario, if Y conditions are met, gather this information from the user, then apply its Z effect like so, but also let the DM &#x2F; user change any of the above or ignore the entire thing before you do so&#x27;, so while I&#x27;ve ordered Designing Data Intensive Applications in hopes of gaining more insights, this problem certainly seems like a big thing to chew on from my self-taught programmer&#x27;s POV right now.