What technologies to use for Terminal-ish Text based RPG? - php

Question

I want to create an old school simplistic Text based RPG. No inventory, no fighting, just finding the right way through a dungeon.
There will be a describing paragraph about each "room" and there will be choices depending on the room. IE, If there's two doors, you can choose which to go through, or if there's items you can use them and so on. As you progress, the story unfolds.
I really want to use php for it, since I don't really know alot of programming and I hear that it's an relatively easy entrance for that. I already know enough php to develop for Wordpress, as well.
I really want it to remind people about the old MUDs, designwise i want to be like a terminal or the cmd. The styling is certainly no problem with css, but i'm still not sure about what to use to make the typing feel good, but i'm currently eyeballing tryruby.org and goosh.org to get the right feel.
Any ideas on how to go forth with that? What Do I need to use? Javascript/jQuery? Any good resources for me to look at?
EDIT: Ofcourse, it's online.

Answer 1

Extending #rmorero answer you can use my terminal emulator, so you don't need to recreate tryruby.org look and feel http://terminal.jcubic.pl and use JSON-RPC, you can use my php library for that https://github.com/jcubic/json-rpc

Answer 2

It all depends on your preference.
A quick way to get started would be a html/javascript frontend and a php backend.
The javascript frontend emulates a console, the implementation at goosh.org looks like great inspiration.
Callbacks can be done through ajax, jQuery is pretty useful here.
You could also take a look at Comet if you want to push content (sending content from the server to the client without the client requesting it - or using requests several times).
PHP for the backend sounds good, you'd just implement a script that returns each location, descriptions and possible exists. I'd recommend looking into the JSON format for this, as it will allow you to return an object like:
{
"title": "A dark room",
"description": "This is a very dark and scary room. The smell is obnoxious",
"exits": {
"nw" : " A small door",
"n" : "A huge ladder"
}
}
Php has built in functions to create json objects from php objects, i.e. json_encode.
You probably want some kind of database as well, to store the locations. Here it depends on what you want to use. You can use a traditional sql database (mysql, postgresql, etc), or a no-sql database (mongodb, redis, etc).

Answer 3

You should look into development frameworks for interactive fiction. The two leading development tools for terminal-style games are Inform and TADS, but Quest looks good as well.
If you want to have an even lower entry barrier -- or just don't want players to type in commands, but rather click on alternative choices -- you might want to look into Choicescript or Undum. Choicescript is extremely easy to use and great for writing strictly choice-based text-adventures. For Undum, you need to know some JavaScript, but you can do more things with it. (I extended Undum once to add RPG-like dice rolls, character sheets, etc.) Quest 5.3 introduced a "Gamebook mode", which makes Choicescript-style games very easy to build as well.
I should point out that none of these environments requires PHP or indeed any sort of client-server communication. One advantage of this is that you can distribute your games very easily: a static website is fine, plus your games can be played offline. Potential disadvantages are that you don't improve your PHP skills; that your games are singleplayer only (though Undum games could be made multiplayer with some effort); and that no matter which environment you choose, you are never quite as flexible as you would have been with plain Javascript or Javascript+PHP.