Part 1

Building Console Applications

We'll kick off the book with four chapters focused on building interactive applications using the plain old system console. While console-based applications have been around for decades, you can still do a lot with text, lines, shapes, and setting foreground and background colors and this part aims to prove that.

We'll start with the basics in building a dynamic storytelling engine using C# and the flexible Spectre.Console library and then step up our game by showing how object-oriented programming paradigms can help organize larger applications and increase the flexibility of your systems and code as we recreate the classic World War II era Enigma machine in C#.

The final two chapters of this part build a fun game with a procedurally generated overworld and a traditional role playing game combat system reminiscent of games originally released for some of the first game consoles back in the 80s and 90s.

While this part is full of fun and games, you'll learn valuable techniques around organizing your code in modular ways, testing, and presenting information in visually compelling ways – even if all you have available is the system console. These skills will set the stage for us to build larger and more modern applications in the later parts of this book.

This part has the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Building an adventure game console app with .NET and Spectre.Console
• Chapter 2, Recreating the Enigma machine with Object-Oriented Programming
• Chapter 3, Exploring infinite worlds with procedural generation
• Chapter 4, Building a Data-Driven Role Playing Game