The Road Not Taken

A choose-your-own Adventure Story Game

In my Computing Concepts and Applications class from sophomore year, we were tasked with creating a final project that would demonstrate our skills and understanding in MATLAB, from writing functions to making graphs and tables to using loops upon loops. Naturally, me and my teammate decided to go above and beyond in our project, as we wanted to make a text-based choose-your-own adventure game. I did the bulk of the story writing and coding, taking a lot of inspiration from the videogame Undertale.

One of my favorite aspects of the game was a printing delay function that I wrote, where it would print each individual letter of a word with a slight delay, allowing you to read the text as it printed in real-time. This mimics the text printing style of a real video game, and I remember having the best “aha!” moment when I finally got this to work.

Building a video game was certainly a challenge, as defining character statistics and inventory, having to keep track of those variables, and then defining how they work with respect to character interactions, was an interesting experience. It required having a big-picture view of what I wanted out of the game, and it required extreme organization on my part. The game occurs in four acts, and at the end of the game, the player is provided with their statsitics, a graph of their statistics over their gameplay, and a player classification of passive, neutral, or aggressive.

Check out the project code if you want to play! :)