adventure 0.3

Colossal cave adventure game at the Python prompt

This is a faithful port of the “Adventure” game to Python 3 from the original 1977 FORTRAN code by Crowther and Woods, driven by the same advent.dat file, that lets you explore Colossal Cave, where others have found fortunes in treasure and gold, though it is rumored that some who enter are never seen again. To encourage the use of Python 3, the game is designed to be played right at the Python prompt. Single-word commands can be typed by themselves, but two-word commands should be written as a function call (since a two-word command would not be valid Python):

>>> import adventure
>>> adventure.play()
WELCOME TO ADVENTURE!!  WOULD YOU LIKE INSTRUCTIONS?

>>> no
YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING.
AROUND YOU IS A FOREST.  A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND
DOWN A GULLY.

>>> east
YOU ARE INSIDE A BUILDING, A WELL HOUSE FOR A LARGE SPRING.

THERE ARE SOME KEYS ON THE GROUND HERE.

THERE IS A SHINY BRASS LAMP NEARBY.

THERE IS FOOD HERE.

THERE IS A BOTTLE OF WATER HERE.

>>> get(lamp)
OK

>>> leave
YOU'RE AT END OF ROAD AGAIN.

>>> south
YOU ARE IN A VALLEY IN THE FOREST BESIDE A STREAM TUMBLING ALONG A
ROCKY BED.

The original Adventure payed attention to only the first five letters of each command, so a long command like inventory could simply be typed as inven. This package defines a symbol for both versions of every long word, so you can type the long or short version as you please.

You can find two complete, working walkthroughs of the game in its tests directory, which you can run using the discover module that comes built-in with Python 3.2:

$ python3.2 -m unittest discover adventure

I wrote most of this package over Christmas vacation 2010, to learn more about the workings of the game that so entralled me as a child; the project also gave me practice writing Python 3. I still forget the parentheses when writing print() if I am not paying attention.

Todo

• Add commands to save and load the game.

• Improve the test coverage with situation-specific tests.

• Once coverage has reached 100%, start cleaning, refactoring, and improving the code — right now it is laid out very much like the original FORTRAN, to make it easier to determine whether its logic really matches.

Changelog

2011 January 31 — 0.3 — first public release