smcamerons-python-adventure VS smcamerons-lua-adventure

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.)

Many people have a pet problem they deploy when learning a new language. For me, it is to write a Zork-like adventure game with a simple parser, rooms that you can move between, and objects you can pick up, drop, and examine, maybe with some support for words like "all", or "everything", or "it" to refer to the last object mentioned. Like this thing I made when I was first messing around with Lua Later, I made a much more complicated thing which is a kind of interactive fiction library in Lua used by a mission script for my space game.