I'm sure you've heard this story before. Someone decides to learn a new programming language. That someone decides to do it by programming a text adventure. This is because graphics and sound are hard, and take away from the bit where you're trying to learn the ins and outs of a new language.

Well, new-ish. I did C and C++ and Java at university. "How different can C# really be?" I wondered.

Anyway, after spending a lot of August 2016 on the form and UI, and September 2016 on the actual game, here we have Tiny Cave Adventure. Some download links are on the right.

(Also, I haven't really done much in HTML for a long while! So this webpage won't look like much. Sorry!)

Right click on these and save as.

• Tiny Cave Adventure game.zip (ZipCrypto encryption) (Most recent update: 6th October 2016)
• Tiny Cave Adventure (AES256).zip (AES-256 encryption) (Most recent update: 6th October 2016)
• Tiny Cave Adventure VS solution.zip (ZipCrypto encryption) (Most recent update: 6th October 2016)

The first two links are the game. I haven't worked out installers yet, so to get it working on your PC, unzip the game to a folder, and double-click on Tiny Cave Adventure.exe.

I'm using 7-Zip to zip up the file and the resultant file isn't working on all computers. I've got two different versions of the zip file above. If neither works for you, let me know.

(This was written with .NET version 4.5.51650. If you have an earlier version on your computer this may not work.)

The third link is the source. I'm not sure of the best way to transfer C# source code, so I've zipped up the entire Visual Studio 2013 solution.

(I'll be updating these links as I figure things out.)

• 1st and 2nd of October 2016: Fixing up the zip files. They had problems.
• 3rd October 2016: Added a "Help -> How does this work" menu option.
• 6th October 2016: Added a "Help -> Hint" menu option.

This isn't completely finished.

• You can't save or load games. I'm still figuring out the best way to serialise complicated data objects with lots of references to each other. Experiments so far have shown my current approach with Data Contract Serializers don't appear to be working.
• There's probably still weird bugs in there.
• As an actual *game* I don't know if it's really any good or much of a challenge. There's a couple of puzzles in there that might be a little bit difficult.
• There's a bit in the story that, uh, well... I wasn't actively trying to be anti-religious when I wrote it, but then I looked back on it and thought, oh bugger. If you are religious, there is a part of the game that you might find offensive. Um, very sorry about that. Spoiler about the sequence.