Description of the Program

AQA Text Adventures is a text adventure game, where the player enters text commands to move between locations, use various items and interact with different characters. The program displays text on the screen to show the user the result of their actions and the current state of the game.

When the program begins, there are no items, characters or places in the game. The program asks the user which game file (which will have the .gme file extension) they would like to use. If the program fails to find the file, then a message will be displayed to the player telling them that the game could not be loaded, and the program will terminate. If the file is found, then all of the items, characters and places in that file are loaded into the program, and the game runs as below.

1. The game checks whether the player has moved to a new place. If they have, then the game displays the description of that place and the items in that place which the player can take.
2. The game asks the player to input an action.
3. The game identifies the command by splitting up the input into the command and the argument (e.g. if the player enters “get torch”, the game will split this into the command “get” and the argument “torch”).
4. If the command is recognised, the game will perform the corresponding action and display the result.

The recognised commands are as follows:

get	Adds the specified item to the player inventory
use	Uses an item in the current place or the player’s inventory
go	Moves the player from their current place to the place in the specified direction
read	Displays the text of a readable item in the current place or the player’s inventory
examine	Provides a description of the specified item, place or character in the current place or the player’s inventory
open	Opens the specified item in the current place
close	Closes the specified item in the current place
move	Moves the specified item in the current place
say	Prints the specified input to the screen
playdice	Plays a dice game with the specified character in the current place
quit	Ends the game

5. If the game doesn’t recognise the command, a message is displayed to say that the player cannot perform that action.

Program Flowchart

Visualisation