TEXT_ADVENTURE_ENGINE

01Features

Save / Load

Full game state serialized to JSON in Unity's persistent data path:

• Player stats, name, health/mana, drunkenness, inventory, equipment, learned skills.
• Active quests with per-objective progress and completed quests.
• Active status effects with remaining durations.
• Every room's runtime state — items, enemies (current health), characters, interactables (keyed by location + asset name so identically-named objects stay independent), exit lock/visibility, shop stock.
• World flags. Loading is resilient: missing assets are skipped with warnings; a deleted location falls back to the main start.

Connect Four Minigame

A built-in alternate game mode reachable from dialogue, played against whichever character started it. Difficulty is set per NPC on the Character asset, so some characters offer casual games and others are nearly unbeatable:

02Getting Started

1. Install Unity 6000.5.1f1 (or a compatible Unity 6 release).
2. Clone the repo and open the project folder in Unity. (Library/, Temp/, Logs/, and builds are excluded from version control and regenerate on first open.)
3. Open the main scene under Assets/Scenes/ and press Play.
4. To build your own game: run Tools ▸ Text Engine ▸ Create Game Scene — a complete, wired game scene in one click. Then create content assets in a Resources/ folder, wire rooms in the World Map Graph Editor, write conversations in the Dialogue Graph Editor, and point the starting locations at your own rooms. A full manual ships in the package (Documentation/Manual.md).

03Command Reference

Inside a shop: buy, sell, leave. With a trainer: buy <skill>, leave. In the minigame: a column number 1–7, or quit.

04Content Authoring

All game content lives inside a Resources/ folder using the subfolder names below, and is loaded into catalogs at startup — this single content home is what makes save/load restore-by-name work. The demo game's content is under Assets/TextAdventureEngine/Demo/Resources/; your own game's content can live in any Resources/ folder with the same subfolder layout. Create assets via Assets ▸ Create ▸ Text Adventure:

Engine Settings

One EngineSettings asset, assigned to the GameController, controls:

• Feature toggles — leveling, primary attributes, drunkenness, status effects. Disabled systems cost nothing and hide their output.
• Content root folder — where the editor tools create new content assets, so your game's content stays cleanly separated from the demo's.
• Simple-stats balance — flat health/attack/hit/dodge used when attributes are off.
• Attribute-derived balance — base values and per-point multipliers for health (STA), mana (INT), attack (STR), hit/dodge (AGI), plus caps.
• Leveling balance — XP curve multiplier, attribute and skill points per level.

05Editor Tools

• Create Game Scene (Tools ▸ Text Engine) — one-click scene setup: builds and wires the full UI + engine rig so a fresh project is playable immediately.
• Content Validator (Tools ▸ Text Engine) — one-click audit of every content asset: broken exit destinations, locked doors without keys, dialogue actions missing their item/quest, out-of-range quest objectives, assets outside Resources/, and duplicate asset names. Severity-ranked, click-to-ping.
• World Map Graph Editor (Window ▸ World Map Graph Editor) — a visual node graph of every location. Drag a compass port into another room's Entrance to create an exit; the reciprocal exit is auto-created but independently deletable, so one-way passages are easy. Re-drags preserve lock/hidden configuration. Full Undo. Right-drag to pan, Ctrl+A to auto-arrange.
• Dialogue Graph Editor (Window ▸ Dialogue Graph Editor) — branching conversations on a canvas: inline text editing, one-click "+ Response", drag-to-link response and failure ports, entry badges per character, auto-arrange, full Undo. Right-drag to pan.
• Flag Inspector (Window ▸ Flag Inspector) — view and toggle all world flags live at runtime.
• Scenario Loader (Window ▸ Scenario Loader) — jump the running game to a defined scenario.
• Custom inspectors for characters, enemies, locations, and dialogue nodes — flag dropdowns fed by the Flag Registry, plus one-click "Create & Link New Node" for building dialogue trees fast.

06Architecture

The runtime is organized around a central GameController with dedicated collaborators rather than one monolith:

Combat, dialogue, and the minigame are partials (rather than standalone classes) because they mutate a large amount of shared player state; splitting the files separates concerns without threading that state through an injected context.

Two wrapper classes keep runtime state off the shared assets: EnemyInstance (blueprint + current health) and ItemInstance (blueprint reference; the hook for future per-copy state like durability). Rooms, shops, inventory, and equipment slots all hold instances — ScriptableObject assets are never mutated at runtime.

The parser resolves the typed verb through the Action catalog (keyword + synonyms), dispatches through a verb-handler table, and falls back to CustomAction assets — the entire verb surface is data-driven.

All runtime code lives in the TextEngine namespace and editor tooling in TextEngine.EditorTools, compiled into separate asmdefs. An EditMode test suite covers the Connect Four AI, the noun matcher, catalog integrity (including duplicate-name detection — saves are name-keyed), and save round-tripping. Save files carry a format version, the GameController validates its scene wiring on startup with actionable [Text Engine] errors, and the engine works under either input backend (legacy Input Manager or the Input System package), detected at compile time.

07Project Layout

Assets/
├── TextAdventureEngine/
│   ├── Runtime/          Engine code (TextEngine namespace, TextEngine.Runtime asmdef)
│   ├── Editor/           Custom inspectors + World Map / Flag / Scenario windows
│   └── Demo/
│       ├── Resources/    The demo game's content (see authoring table)
│       ├── Scenes/       Demo scene + main menu
│       └── Prefabs/
└── TextMesh Pro/