Building a Text Adventure Game

Turn words into worlds: rooms, an inventory, and choices that matter

Big Idea: A text adventure is a game made only of words. The computer describes a room, you type where you want to go, and the story branches from your choices. In this project we glue together everything you have learned so far -- input, if / elif / else, loops, lists, dictionaries, and functions -- to build one small, complete game.

By the end you will be able to:

store a map of rooms in a dictionary,
show a room and read the player's move with input,
move from room to room using if / elif / else,
keep an inventory in a list,
run the game with a while loop and end it with win / lose conditions,
tidy the code into small functions.

1. What is a text adventure?

Think of a choose-your-own-adventure book. You read a page, then it says "to open the door, turn to page 12; to run away, turn to page 30." You decide what happens next. A text adventure game is the same idea, but the computer keeps the pages and turns them for you.

Every text adventure has three simple parts:

Rooms -- the places you can be, each with a description and a set of exits.
The player -- where you are right now, and what you are carrying.
The loop -- show the room, ask for a move, react, and repeat until you win or lose.

We will build these one piece at a time. The good news: you already know every tool we need. We are just putting them together.

2. The map: rooms in a dictionary

A dictionary stores things by name. That is perfect for a map: each room has a name, a description, and a list of exits. We can even nest a small dictionary of exits inside each room.

rooms = {
    "Hall": {
        "desc": "You are in a bright entrance hall.",
        "exits": {"north": "Kitchen", "east": "Library"}
    },
    "Kitchen": {
        "desc": "A warm kitchen. Something smells nice.",
        "exits": {"south": "Hall"}
    },
    "Library": {
        "desc": "Tall shelves full of dusty books.",
        "exits": {"west": "Hall"}
    }
}

Read it like a table of contents. rooms["Hall"] gives you the Hall's information. rooms["Hall"]["exits"] gives just its exits: {"north": "Kitchen", "east": "Library"}. So standing in the Hall and going north takes you to the Kitchen.

Why a dictionary and not a list? With a list you would look rooms up by number (rooms[0]), which is easy to muddle. With a dictionary you look them up by their real name (rooms["Kitchen"]), which reads like plain English.

Building a Text Adventure Game