Inspiration
We sat down with a list of things we had done recently and also challenges we had recently encountered and brainstormed. One of the points on our list was that we had just spent about 7 hours on a bus. We started talking about things to do to kill time on a bus and so the idea of a text based story game over text came to be.
What it does
Essentially you text a number and you receive an option for which game scenario you wish to play, then you play through it as you would a regular text based story, either by making multiple choice decisions or occasionally texting in a command.
How I built it
We planned on using twilio for sending and managing the sent and received text massages. The story itself was set up using python.
Challenges I ran into
One of the most significant challenges we ran into was right at the start, to sign up for a twilio account you need an active phone number (for them to either text or call you a verification code) unfortunately both of us are from Canada and do not have signal here. We asked around if we could borrow someone's phone and tried setting up google voice numbers. Another challenge was setting up software which would process the users texted input (not just the multiple choice answers). We found a version of this online and tried basing ours off of it.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We went from not having any ideas to brainstorming for a long time and later coming up with an idea we both liked.
What I learned
I learned that often things that would not at first appear to be problems (or problems at all) can become the greatest difficulties.
What's next for SMS Text Based Adventure Game
Hopefully with working signal back home we can more properly implement our ideas. The text analyzing code will probably require a lot more time.
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