Halfway Across

Inspired by my love of slow-paced revisionist westerns like Jeremiah Johnson and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, this parser-based interactive fiction game—enhanced with artwork and sound—follows a man adjusting to life as a mountain man in the late 1800s. I created this project to explore Object-Oriented Programming in C++ and GUI development with Qt.

Tech Stack

Gameplay Mechanics

• Crafting: Use resources to make items that can aid in your survival
• Hunting: Obtain raw food and other resources by hunting animals in the valley
• Ice Fishing: Obtain raw food by catching fish at the lake
• Resource Management: Weigh the costs and benefits of keeping an item on your person during your travels
• Social Interaction: Converse and trade with travelers, knowing that your dialogue choices will impact how they perceive you

Challenges & Solutions

• Complex Entities: It became clear while planning the project that several aspects of the game would have many attributes (e.g. entities, player, and world state), this made them ideal candidates for implementing as objects
• Commands & Aliases: Early in development, I didn't have a concrete idea of what commands and aliases would be essential to make the game intuitive. My solution to this was to periodically have friends and family members play the game while I noted where unsupported commands were encountered for later implementation. This testing also revealed that an individual's manner of speaking can influence what filler words they might try to enter, so the game filters those out
• Ambiguous Navigation: The visual style is intentionally hazy and lo-fi, which doesn't make it clear what directions the player can move from their current position. I found that the best solution was to add a compass to the UI that displays which directions are accessible

Lessons Learned

• Header Guards: I discovered the importance of header guards when dealing with multiple source files, which I had not needed in my simpler C/C++ projects
• Interpreter Architecture: As a text adventure is essentially a specialized interpreter, writing one introduced me to concepts like Read-Eval-Print Loops and lexical tokenization
• Modular Design: This project required me to develop a sense of when something should be modularized, as the projects that I built before this weren't expansive enough to warrant splitting into multiple header and source files

Future Plans

Although my focus has shifted toward systems programming and reverse engineering throughout my education, I intend to return to this project occasionally to expand on its mechanics and narrative.

Further Reading

• C++ Header Guards
• Read-Eval-Print Loops