Building a text game

The good 'ol text game

Anyone who grew up playing Spectrums like myself will appreciate the good 'ol text games where what you type in 
controls what happens in the game.  In this tutorial hopefully I will convince a few people to add some text games 
to the web using Flash.  I've used various other bits of software which claim to be fantastic and sell themselves on 
'you don't need to know code to make a text game'.  However they all take so long to learn to use and are very limited,
whereas using Actionscript means you can build the game with endless possibilities.  Check out the attached .fla file
to see what a couple of rooms in the final game will look like.

The layers

Create 3 layers as shown in the image below, 'Code', 'Main', 'Image1'.  The Image1 layer is optional depending on
whether you want images as aids in the text game or not.

The interface

In the 'Main' layer add a keyframe to cover 3 frames of the timeline.  Then add the following (see image for layout) -
1)	A TEXTBOX - This will display the main storyline text.
	Set to dynamic text, with a variable name of 'texty'.
2)	A TEXTBOX - This will display the objects you can pick up or drop in any room.
	Set to dynamic text, with a variable name of 'objecty'.
3)	A TEXTBOX - This will let you type and control the game.
	Set to input text, with a variable name of 'inputy'.
4)	A LISTBOX - This will display objects you pick up throughout the game.
	Label this 'listbox1'.
5)	A MOVIE CLIP SYMBOL - This is optional, you can have images to aid in describing a scene.
	Label this 'image1'.