You Better Work, Witch

Jimmy Dunn w200 Project 1

Fall 2018

Email: jdunn@ischool.berkeley.edu

Title Citation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt8VYOfr8To

“You Better Work, Witch” (YBWW) is a text-based game where the player takes on the role of a full-time witch working in a small town somewhere in the countryside. The goal of the game is to fulfill as many customer orders as possible (making money along the way) within a 10 minute time limit.

Playing the Game

To play the game, the player will run python play.py at the command line. Due to a limitation of the curses library, the player must ensure their terminal window is large enough to accommodate the user interface (52 rows by 160 columns). This should fit on 13.3 in. displays and larger.

On startup, the game will display an intro screen that will show the player which windows will display what kinds of information. The player will perform actions by entering the corresponding keys. The game is designed such that it will respond to the player entering a key immediately, no need to press enter.

The player will need to fulfill customer orders when they show up to their cauldron. The player will look through their recipe book to figure out how to create the items the customers want. The player will have to move around the map to different locations in order to collect the ingredients they will need to mix at their cauldron to create orders.

If this wasn’t enough, this generation of customers are really impatient and won’t wait forever for the player to create their orders. If their wait time expires, they will leave and take their money with them. But don’t worry, they will be replaced by a new customer with a new order. thank u, next.

User Interface

The user interface will populate in the terminal upon running the play.py file and will be subdivided into six sub-windows.

The top left window contains a list of active customers, including their orders and their current wait times.

The top middle window contains the time remaining for the game, counting down from 10 minutes.

The top right window contains the player’s revenue (or score).

The bottom left window contains the player’s inventory, including up to a maximum of 9 items.

The bottom middle window contains a list of keys a player can input to perform actions. It also populates warnings at the bottom whenever the player runs into errors.

The bottom right window contains location information, including the player’s current location, any neighbors, and any items available to be collected.

Reflections

There are a few user experience design elements I would’ve liked to get to if I had more time.

I wanted to develop a more detailed “Game Over” screen that provided an overview of all the orders the player fulfilled correctly, orders they messed up, and orders they missed.

In addition, I wanted to play test the customer wait times a bit more to give different difficulty feelings for different customers.

It would have been fun to flesh out the tech tree for recipes. Due to space constraints, I could only display two ingredients per order in the recipe book. It would have been cool to develop 3+ ingredients for some of the recipes.

In conclusion, this was a huge project. I think I came close to biting off more than I could chew, especially with learning the nuances of the curses library. However, I’m pretty proud of myself for designing classes and objects in a way that allowed me to handle the low-level details of curses separately from designing the high-level game functions.

I hope you enjoy!