Documentation:Oregon Trail

Authors: James Zang, Connor Quigg, Aidan Frost

What is the problem?

We will be investigating the possibility of using the Haskell language for adventure-style interactive games with graphical elements.

To explore this concept, we plan on implementing a re-scaled version of the Oregon Trail game, with user-controlled events and progression. We plan on using graph data structures to encapsulate different route/event possibilities throughout the execution of the game and incorporate random event generation to impose new, unexpected challenges to the user.

What is the something extra?

We plan to focus our efforts on a GUI for better user interactivity. Most likely, we will build on top of an existing library like https://github.com/jtdaugherty/brick or https://hackage.haskell.org/package/gloss. The original Oregon Trail game (check it out at https://archive.org/details/msdos_Oregon_Trail_The_1990) features a custom Terminal-style UI, so we will draw inspiration from that.

What did we learn from doing this?

(This should be written after you have done the work.) What is the bottom-line? Is functional programming suitable for (part-of) the task? Make sure you include the evidence for your claims.