Let's Explore Geography! Canadian Commodities Trader Simulation Exercise

Let’s Explore Geography is a text-adventure game where you drive around Canada trading commodities. It has over 50 cities to explore and 40 tradable commodities.

I created the game using Desmos Computation Layer, a simple, restrictive programming language intended for adding small interactive features to online math lessons. DCL is a pure-functional language without loops or user-defined functions; a typical DCL program is a one-liner along the lines of “the text box says ‘Correct!’ if the user entered 7 and ‘Try again!’ otherwise.”

On the other hand, Let’s Explore Geography is a complex interactive game whose DCL source code is over 200 kilobytes in size. It abuses the “action button” feature (a button that, when pressed, adds a number to a list) to create a complex state machine. To make it easier to write, I created a programming language called MacroDCL and wrote a compiler to convert it to DCL code.

The game also includes a printable map, which I made using QGIS, and descriptions of tourist attractions at each of the cities, most of which were researched and written by my little sister Kyra.

You can try the game out on the Interactive Fiction Database.