REST Mud

A Text Adventure for practicing your technical web testing, use of browser tools and REST API tooling.

Text Adventure Games

Text Adventure Games are a perfect training ground for Software Testing.

• You have to explore
• You have to observe
• You have to build a model of the world you are within
• Game logic is different from world logic, so you have to model it in context.
• You have to keep track of what you have tried
• You have to build a map
• You learn how the game works as you play it

This is an open source application, you can find it at:

• https://github.com/eviltester/restmud

The REST Mud Games

That’s why. We have created the RestMud games.

Essentially classic Text Adventures with a “verb noun” parser.

The GUI is simple. All text, and much of the game can be played by clicking on the onscreen links because we want to make it easy to start playing and start exploring.

e.g. Want to go South? Then click “S” in the “Visible Exits” section when you “look”.

But we want you to have to build a model of the game, so you can’t do everything via the GUI.

• You will have to learn to amend URLs
• You will have to use the browser developer tools to see more information
• You could learn to read JSON and look at the log output
• You could even use the Rest API

Single Player Games

You can download a Single Player Game map for free to play and practice on your own.

Basic Test Game

This catchily titled game is our “Basic Test Game”. A small map with a maze and a few puzzles. “full” documentation is contained in the zip file.

• Download it
• Unzip it
• Make sure you have Java 1.8 or above installed
• Run it
• Play the game: localhost:4567/player/user/look
• Brag about your score on twitter

More Hints and Help

Warning this section has spoilers.

I created a hand drawn map when writing and playing the game. You should too. When you play adventure games, create a map. It does not have to be fancy, it just has to support your play.

I also created a walkthrough of the game, which you can download as a pdf file. This shows an end to end run through of the game, and reveals all of the point scoring secrets and is a complete walkthrough of the game.

Only use this if you get stuck.

Multi-Player Games

The multi-player ‘MUD’ version is reserved for our workshops and training where we teach more about Web Testing and Rest API testing, so it isn’t available to download. Contact Us if you would like some in-house Technical Web Testing workshop where we use a different set of maps in multi-player mode, as part of our training to learn and explore Web and API testing in more detail.

Technology:

• Spark for HTTP server
• Gson
• JUnit
• Rest-Assured and HTTPClient
• HTTP version deployed to Heroku
• Local deploy possible
• CLI version
• Separate Game Engine
• DSL for Game Creation
• DSL for Game Testing
• Experimental approach to multi-user testing with ‘bots’
• Auto-generation of Walkthrough documentation from tests
• Multi-project Maven Pom to support different deployments

Code at https://github.com/eviltester/restmud

Social Media Mentions

Everyone: @eviltester has released RestMud. If you like text adventures and/or testing, make time.https://t.co/PCC4b0oTip
(I love it)

— James Lyndsay (@workroomprds) June 13, 2016

I love @eviltester. As I read the instructions for RestMud, I love him even more! Lord knows what'll happen once I start playing the thing!

— Vernon Richards (@TesterFromLeic) June 19, 2016

#30DaysOfTesting Day 4: I shared @eviltester's RestMud game with a dev colleague. Great fun, not just for testers! https://t.co/7bEiiutDxX

— Neil Studd (@neilstudd) July 4, 2016

Awesome evening of fun with Restmud tonight! Thanks @eviltester for creating this great way to improve our skills! pic.twitter.com/YOQ2VqEaxH

— JoburgSWTesters (@JoburgSWTesters) July 5, 2016