smcamerons-python-adventure VS inform7-ide

I don't know if this counts, but I wrote a parser for "the ship's computer" in my game, "Space Nerds in Space". It's described here: https://scaryreasoner.wordpress.com/2016/05/14/speech-recogn...

I also wrote some toy "interactive fiction" things (with less sophisticated parsers) in python and Lua as a way to gain familiarity with those languages, not that they are very interesting in and of themselves, though they demonstrate a fairly standard technique behind these kinds of games in a compact way.

https://github.com/smcameron/smcamerons-python-adventure

https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space/blob/maste...

Here's a trivial text adventure in python I made when I was starting to learn python: https://github.com/smcameron/smcamerons-python-adventure

The point though is to start with a very simple, well known, text only type of game, like interactive fiction or a "text adventure", or whatever they call Zork like games nowadays, which in its simplest incarnation is (or at least can be) pretty simple (i.e, mine is about 400 lines of Lua), but can be made arbitrarily more complex by adding new types of objects, object interactions, verbs, and sentence syntax that it can understand. It will give you a good feel for how to organize a Lua program, how to deal with data structures ("tables" in Lua), etc. It's simple enough, and being text only, you don't get caught up in details of the problem that don't actually have much to do with the language itself, but complex enough that you have to think a bit. I find it a good problem for new languages (I did the same thing when learning python.)

For those looking for Linux packages instead of compiling themselves, there's a github build project of an earlier version this year https://github.com/ptomato/inform7-ide/actions/runs/19915523...

Inform 7 is a domain-specific language for creating parser-based works of interactive fiction (i.e. old-school "text adventure games"). It does the heavy lifting of parsing and maintaining the consistency of the world model for the programmer.

Inform 7 takes this to the extreme, allowing code such as "A distance is a kind of value. 5 miles specifies a distance."

Pure parser-based games have become niche, but they are still out there and, like others mentioned, have continued to evolve (see Inform 7). You no longer have to "guess the verb".

Neat. Have you ever seen Inform? http://inform7.com/ Might offer some inspiration on future features. It's a pretty cool language that's been around for a long time and has the same use case.