exploration 0.1.1

Tool for reading, formatting, and manipulating exploration graphs, which are graphs (or graph-sequences) that describe exploration of a game space, principally designed with Metroidvania games in mind.

Exploration

Overview

This program provides data types for representing the exploration of spaces that can defined (or abstracted) in terms of discrete decisions, such as videogame levels with multiple rooms and also other things like conversation trees or a city block grid.

It represents a Map as a multi-di-graph, indicating the connection(s) between decisions, which can include information about prerequisites for transitions as well as effects a transition might have on the world. There is also a convention for representing unexplored regions using specially-named nodes of the graph. An Exploration is a sequence of Maps, along with a sequence of decisions indicating where the explorer was at each step, a sequence of transitions indicating which transition was taken at each step, and a sequence of states indicating extra state at each step. These representations were developed with Metroidvania games in mind.

Core capabilities include:

• Reasoning about reachability modulo transition requirements in terms of powers that must be possessed and/or tokens that must be spent for a transition. TODO
• The ability to represent fairly sophisticated game logic in the Map, and even construct playable maps. Game logic that can't be captured this way can still be represented through making custom changes to maps between exploration steps. TODO
• Creating maps and explorations from various text formats, including exploration journal formats. TODO

Dependencies:

• Python version 3.7+
• networkx For underlying graph structures.
• pytest for testing, install with [test] option to get it automatically.

Installing

Just run pip install exploration. The egtool script should be installed along with the module.

You can then run python -m exploration.tests to run tests.

Getting Started:

The egtool script provides a command-line interface to core functionality. The exploration.main module provides equivalent entry points from Python. exploration.core provides the main types and explains how they fit together.

Plans

TODO

Changelog

• v0.1.1 Still pre-alpha as it's in the process of being re-architected a bit, but some core functionality is present if rough (e.g., core.DecisionGraph and core.Exploration).
• v0.1 Initial pre-alpha upload.