This is an implementation of Werewolves and Wanderer, the first project in Tim Hartnell's Creating Adventure Games on Your Computer, in Rust.

You can try it in your browser. It should work on browsers at least as old as IE11, as well as a variety of screen readers.

Alternatively, it can also be run as a command-line program.

Motivation

CAGYC is probably the oldest book I've continuously owned and taken with me as I moved from place to place. I first bought it (or rather, my parents bought it for me) at a bookstore at some point in the 1980s, and I always found it inspirational to pore through its pages. But I never actually started any of the projects in the book, much less completed them.

In 2017 I was learning Rust and thought a text adventure would be a nice way to learn the language, so I decided to actually start the book's first project.

Quick start

Install Rust, clone the project and run:

cargo run

If you want to try the web version, you can install Emscripten and NodeJS and run:

npm install
bash build-emscripten.sh
cd static
python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Then visit http://localhost:8000/ in your browser.

You can also deploy the static/ directory to any webserver that hosts static files.

Debug mode

On non-release builds, a debug menu is included to aid in debugging. Press the backtick key in the game's primary exploration mode to enter it.

Implementation notes

• The architecture of the program (very) loosely follows that of the original BASIC program from CAGYC. In particular, this means that the game world isn't particularly object-oriented. It feels a bit baroque in some ways. I don't think I used dynamic dispatch at all.

  That said, I did go a bit overboard with some abstractions, so there's a bit of variety.

• Some of the "bugs" in the program are intentional features from the original BASIC implementation. For example, the chapter on Interpreting Your Commands states:

  You can enter the full word (such as NORTH) or just the first letter. As you can see, the last part of line 460 cuts the input down to a single letter anyway, so you may as well just enter the first letter of your command.

  This actually results in lots of unexpected behavior, as e.g. "eat" causes the player to go east rather than consume a unit of food.

  I found this funny so I left it in.

• Because of the fact that the web version can't block the UI thread to wait for user input--well, at least not in a user-friendly way--the program's source code is actually capable of running with or without blocking I/O, depending on the context.

  While this made it possible to write a program that ran via the command-line and the web, it also made things a bit confusing and cumbersome.

  In the future I might try using something like futures-rs instead.

  Update: While futures-rs was a bit overwhelming for me, I did manage to refactor things to make them (hopefully) less confusing and cumbersome in #1.

• When I originally started this project, I wanted it to work on bare metal setups that lacked a heap. I'm not sure why I wanted to do that, but I did, and eventually it became too cumbersome so I changed my mind. As a result, though, parts of the codebase are a bit, um, idosyncratic.