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2 minute read - Evil Tester Technical Testing

Text Adventure Games for Testers

Jun 13, 2016

TLDR; Announcing RestMud, a free text adventure game designed to improve your technical testing skills.

I love text adventure games. Playing. Writing. Programming. Love ’em. And now I have created a text adventure game for testers to improve their technical testing skills.

  • I wrote about text adventure games before, in the context of keyword driven automated execution.
  • I studied AI, compilers and interpreters because I wanted to understand Text Adventure Games
  • I’ve written more text adventure game parsers than I have adventure games. All lost to the mists of time in my cave of lost ‘C’ programming code:
  • I once wrote a wonderful text layout algorithm for text adventure games that only worked on the Mono screen resolution of the Atari ST - it looked great.
  • I wrote a fantastic complex sentence handler with verbs, nouns, adverbs, pro-nouns, more nouns, conjunctions etc. Brilliant parser. But no game.
  • I once, with a friend of mine, started to pitch a point and click western horror sci-fi adventure game to a games publishing company - just as point and click adventure games faded and died as a genre.
  • I wrote small games in “The Quill”, GAC, STAC, and others.

And now.

I unleash upon the world.

“RestMud”

(That was dramatic by the way.)

A Text Adventure for the modern world, and to help improve your testing skills.

You’ll have to:

  • explore
  • take things
  • hoard things
  • explore a maze
  • map the world
  • pay attention to clues
  • use the Browser Dev Tools
  • amend URLs to access commands not available from the GUI
  • remember things
  • possibly use REST tools (although for the Single Player Basic Test Game this isn’t required)

Wow. I mean wow. Wow. Are you wowed yet? I’m wowed.

I played the test game again this morning and scored 1190 - but I made a mistake. Can you score higher than that?

Try it for yourself. Download it and see. You’ll need Java 1.8, instructions are in the zip file.

You can download it from the RestMud page.

You can use comments to let me know of any issues, or brag about your success, or whatever else you choose to use comments for. But now, brave adventurer… Go! Do some adventuresome stuff.


You will need a Github account to comment. Or you can contact me with your comment.

I reserve the right to delete spam comments e.g. if your comment adds no value and its purpose is simply to create a backlink to another site offering training, or courses, etc.