1 hour, 44 minutes ago

Gulp. Got to upload it to...somewhere.

I have to admit a bit of ignorance here. What are squares? Numbers that are the square of another number, I assume? Because I had some in my puzzle, but not enough to make a chain.

Seems like it could make a neat little mobile time-waster with a few tweaks. Why no "odds"?

That's where the challenge was for me.

I usually program in a notebook. I write out, rewrite and rewrite, and only once happy with structure and API do I begin to implement it with a machine.

With only 1 hour... You don't have time to care if it's a reprehensible mess of structure. It's write and run and hope it works.

If a potential employer saw my code in this thread, I'd be embarrassed. It's not good code. But it does work, and it did take an hour.

If you're already familiar with a framework (LOVE, Unity, etc.) then some of the organization is already decided for you so you can save a lot of start up time.

My hands are screwing up. I'll have to continue later. But, for my first 15mins:

#!/bin/sh

intro() {
  echo 'The sun sets.'
  echo 'The hero rises.'
  echo 'Do you deserve the title?'
  echo ''
  echo 'Loading...'
  sleep 5s
  clear
}

# Actions:
# Attack
# Defend
# Run

check_gt() {
  echo "$1 > $2" | bc
}

inc() {
  echo "$1 + 1" | bc
}

player_attack='1'
player_defend='1'

intro
while true; do
  echo 'You can:'
  echo '1. Attack'
  echo '2. Defend'
  echo '3. Run'
  while [ -z "$action" ]; do
  read -p 'Do) ' action
  case "$action" in
    [1]*) echo 'Attack!'; break;;
    [2]*) echo 'Defend!'; break;;
    [3]*) echo 'Run!'; break;;
    [Qq]*) echo 'Quit.'; exit 0; break;;
    *) action=''; read -p 'Do) ' action; break;;
  esac
  done
  echo "You chose: $action"
  action=''
done

Most of what these libraries handle is the asynchronous behavior of a GUI program, abstracting over controls and graphics APIs, and maybe providing you with some pre-written physics code. None of that is necessary in a text-base game. You should be able to write a text-based CLI game using nothing but a programming language's standard library.

It's been a while since I've seriously been into IF, but I think TADS has a pretty good engine. I don't know if there's anything newer.

If you're not looking for things to be happening when the player is idle, then any language will do.

On Windows, you have ol' batch, and Powershell available without installing anything.

On MacOS, you probably have outdated Python 2, AppleScript, ol' shell (what I used), and a slight improvement on shell called Bash available without installing anything.

On Linux you have shell, probably Bash, probably a Python (2 or 3, depending on the distribution), and maybe some harder languages too. (Like Awk. You could use it, but that would require an understanding most people don't have.)

A bunch of languages can be installed on any of those, so that your game will run on all of them. Powershell and Python are examples of that, and simple languages.

The basic idea is, give some output, and then ask the player to respond, and then act on it.

Examples

Windows Batch:

Copy the below into a text file, and rename the extension to .bat

@echo off
REM The above line hides the commands being run.
REM And lines starting like this one are comments.
set /p name="What is your name? "
REM The above line stores a variable into name
echo Hello %name%
REM And now we're outputting both the word Hello and the name variable

Now, I haven't covered flow control, how you jump to different places in the program, because it is... Painful. But easy to discover.

Powershell

Copy the below into a text file, and rename the extension to .ps

# This is a comment
Write-Host "This is how you output text!"
$name = Read-Host "This is how you get input: "
if($name -eq "s4b3r6") {
  Write-Host "Really? That's my name!"
} else {
  Write-Host "Hello, " $name "!"
}

There are plenty of resources to help learning Powershell, but the above is a nice little taste.

Python:

# This makes it compatible to take input in both 2 & 3
# i.e. renames v2's raw_input, which works the same was as v3's input
try:
    input = raw_input
except NameError:
    pass

# This is a comment
print("Hello, World!")
print("Who are you?")
x = input("> ")
# Comparison is simple.
if x == "s4b3r6":
    print("Hey! That's my name!")
else:
    # The braces will get replaced thanks to adding the .format command.
    print("Hello {}".format(x))

Though there are major differences between Python 2 & 3, this should run in both. (Well, only Python 2.7 and above, but that seems good enough for this example.)

For shell, look to my 1hr game.

I knew about Twine, but AFAIK I have to use Javascript to extend it, and I have no interest in this language. I didn't know about Ren'Py, but it looks like a great platform, and I really like Python. Thanks!

It should just be:

sudo apt install love