We have a more than a week and a half before our next meeting and I wanted to reiterate Michael’s challenge to the group to hack a little text adventure together. His original post talked about implementing a toy game in Python but it would be just as interesting to see these coded up in any dynamic or vaguely esoteric language. That’s right any dynamic or esoteric language.
I’ve been working on mine in my spare time and it’s been a lot of fun. It’s been a really helpful way to get some exercise in a new language; it’s a lot more interesting than the logging and testing framework I was working on. 
At our next meeting we could take a look at some source code and talk about it a little bit. It would be an interesting way to get a taste of what some of the other dynamic languages are like, all of the sudden there are a lot of them to choose from. Being able to see the different ways the different languages enable developers to solve the same set of problems is what interests me the most.
Code would be due the day before our next meeting, May 15th, and could be submitted to the list. Everyone would bring a couple copies of their source code to pass around the group. If enough people are interested and feel the time constraint is too tight, I’d be excited to push it up a meeting to get more people involved.
What is this challenge?
The challenge is to build a very basic text adventure game using the dynamic language of your choice. As much as you can, you should stick to standard libraries (i.e., don’t pull in a text adventure building library). At bare minimum, the game should…
- Enable the player to move around from room to room
- Understand simple commands
- Understand maybe one or two more complicated commands (”open the door with the key”)
Here’s a link to a sample implementation. It doesn’t do much but gives you an idea of the sort of scope we’re looking for. We’re not talking about “Zork”. 
http://snurl.com/279g8 [livingcode_org]
And, of course, there’s no stress on story. Three rooms and a box is just fine.
Let us know you are interested!
If you are interested in taking part, e-mail the list and let us know what language you think you might target. Certainly you can change your mind at any time, I’m hoping that as people join in it’ll keep everyone’s energy up.
Submitting code
Once you have some code together, you can get it to the group a couple of ways.
- Post it to a website and send the URL to the list
- Setup an account on assembla.com and send the URL to the list
- Send the code to the list and I’ll post it on the wmassdevs website
I’m looking forward to seeing what you hack together! 
