Elysium

An ASCII adventure game where you try to convince 26 people to join you at the Elysian Field.

Elysium is still a work in progress, but you can try a demo by downloading and running one of the binaries in the releases section.

Building from source

Elysium's build system relies on the following software:

• GCC
• Make
• Python 3

To bulild Elysium from source, clone this repo, navigate to it on the command line, and run make. This will generate the elysium binary, which you may run to play the game.

Development

Elysium's C source files are in the src directory and their associated headers are in the include directory. Elysium's game data is mostly separate from its logic, and can be found in the data folder. In this folder there are three files:

• world.txt which contain the data for the game's map. The file gen_menus.py parses this file and translates it into a C char * array in the file world.c, to be directly embedded in the game's code. When the player starts a new game, the new_game() function defined in the file src/menu_manual.c reads this array to load in the the player, objects, and NPCs at their correct positions. If you would like to extend Elysium with a greater variety of entities, then you'll want to take a look at the new_game() function.

• ending.txt, which is similar to world.txt except that it specifies the map for the game's ending.

• menus.json, which contains the data for the game's NPCs' dialogue trees. The script scripts/gen_menus.py reads this file and generates the files menu.h and menu.c from its contents. menus.json is an array of arrays. The first element of each nested array says what type of entity it describes:

  • variables that trigger different NPC dialogue. The second element of the array is the variable's name, and the third is its C type.
  • menus that describe phrases the NPCs can say to the player, and how they can respond. The second element of the array is the menu's unique ID, the third is the text the NPC says for this menu, and the fourth is an array of the player's possible responses to this menu. Each response option is either the ID of a response they player can always respond with, or a two-element array whose second element is the option's ID, and whose first element is a condition that needs to evaluate to true at runtime for the option to be available.
  • options that describe phrases the players can say to NPCs, and how they will respond. The second element of the array is the option's unique ID, the third element is the option's text, the fourth is the ID of the menu the NPC will respond with (or null if there is no response), and the fifth element is custom C code to run after the player selects this option.

  If you would like to extend Elysium's dialogue, check out data/menus.json and scripts/gen_menus.py.