Play game by coding your strategy

Question

I am building a simple strategy game, the goal of the game to teach programming basics to kids.

The concept of the game is simple, there will be a set of colony individuals - different type (resource gathering, fight, defend, scout ..etc).

I want to build a Campaign mode for this game, simple set of scenarios and missions as beta version.

As I said, the purpose is to teach programming basics, so player need to code there strategy to play the game, means that each colony individual's behavior will be programmed separately.

I am thinking of creating a basic syntax for code conditions, commands and actions (custom language), player will simply code individual's behavior by simply grouping these conditions, commands and actions in logical order. An example:

if FindEnemy
    if stamina > 0.6
       dobattle;
    else
       returnToNest;
    endif;
endif;

My question is that I am building the game using HTML5/CSS3/JS, and wondering I can implement it a client-side library to parse custom language and convert it to animation? or whether there is already built JS library or engine that can do similar requirement?

Answer 1

If this is for kids, then another option is to use a GUI based alternative. Taking your example as reference:

if FindEnemy
    if stamina > 0.6
       dobattle;
    else
       returnToNest;
    endif;
endif

Rather than getting them to type out text, you can have blocks (very literally) like so:

Then you can work out what kind of mechanism you could have to insert an available block into the into the behaviour blocks. This essentially makes up a sort of script, where the users can drag over an IF block and enter a condition.

This method offers a number of advantages:

• Much easier to implement than text parsing as you don't need to worry about syntax errors (which is probably more likely to happen with first-time programmers).
• You can easily limit the scope of your work as the amount of functionality you give to the user is dependent on what blocks you make available.
• It's a much nicer experience for the user if they're starting out. Since they're scripting a game, they want to be able to see the results of their efforts as soon as possible, there's no need to memorise any APIs as all the available functionality is laid out in front of them and it's their choice.
• You can also help their debugging woes before they even compile and run by checking there aren't any illegal block combinations as soon as you can (for example, an ENDIF block when there's no opening IF)
• You more or less know what to expect from user input. For example a user typing in "IF BLAH YES THIS SOMETHING!! WOOP1!!1!" would probably result in invalid syntax, but let's say an IF block had a combo box in it to select all possible attributes that have conditions (like stamina) then you know the input they provide is legal.

I understand that this doesn't completely answer your question regarding text parsing, but I thought I'd suggest another method of doing so that might be a lot easier than a lot of syntax headaches for both the end user and yourself.

Hope that helps!