Better way?

[ziodice]

I was making a text based game a few posts ago, and is there a better way to do it then just use Thousands of if statements / switch thingies? and lots of while loops? I'm trying to do it with only the Iostream and cstdlib stuff

[pabloist]

http://www.cplusplus.com/articles/G13hAqkS/

Q) Why did you say I shouldn't make a text based adventure game? What's wrong with them?
They're not easy to make. In fact they're one of the harder games you can make.

Parsing text input and making sense of it alone is difficult. Add onto that the heavy events and complexities involved in text based adventure games an you have a project that a beginner probably isn't equipped to handle.

Believe it or not, simple realtime action games with animation and graphics (like a simple galaga or space invaders clone) are tons easier to make.

Beginners want to try out the text based games because they think it will be easier because they think graphics are difficult. But they're mistaken!

Just quoting this for truth - though as to your question, I'm not sure myself.

[ziodice]

For some reason whenever I try and compile something like SDL code it doesn't work so I thought this would be easier. I guess I'll keep trying with the SDL though

[sohguanh]

I believe I know one of the reasons why many beginners opt for text based games. Most of the times they are playing games on Windows platform. Then most likely they research the Net to look for how to have graphics program on Windows platform. And then some out-dated sites will show the classic WinAPI Hello World program with that big switch statement and all those Hungarian notation all over the code. The sheer look turn most beginners off.

This lead to them to believe hey maybe having a text based games would be easier instead. So until we remove all sites from showing that "classic" WinAPI Hello World program, this trend will continue and every year you will see beginners asking how to do text based games.