Interactive Fiction on Twitter

I put together a twitter bot that lets you play classic Text Based Adventures through twitter. The bot runs a game on a Raspberry Pi and tweets the console output from the game. Periodically the bot checks its mentions for tweets containing commands and sends those to the game.

The bot’s twitter feed can be found here:

https://twitter.com/TweetIntFict

The source code for the bot can be found here:

https://github.com/goshdarngames/TwitterAdventureBot

I made the bot after watching an interesting documentary on the history of Interactive Fiction:

The project served as a good distraction from burnout on my other project – virtual reality snake. In that project I have been using Test Driven Development fairly heavily with the goal of having complete test coverage. It’s slow going and I reached a breaking point when I went to shuffle a list in JavaScript and found that I would have to write my own shuffle function. I didn’t really feel like writing a Fischer-Yates shuffle for the millionth time…

Making a project using Python was a nice change of pace since it includes most of those little functions you often find yourself needing.

The twitter bot also served as a good opportunity to make a project using Docker. Containerization on Linux is a new concept to me and I have to say I’m completely blown away by it. It solves a lot of the problems I was having with Python in the past – chiefly: packaging Python programs for other people to use.

Repeat Fractal

I put a gallery of fractals I made here:

Repeat