Story Builder
Your first game on the ZX Spectrum: a mad-libs story generator. Ask the player for words, weave them into a story, and reveal it with a title, colour, and a flourish.
Story Builder is your first game — a mad-libs machine. It asks the player for a handful of words, remembers them, and weaves them into a ridiculous little story it reads back. No scoring, no loops, no opponents yet — just the computer asking, and telling.
You arrive knowing the language. Meet BASIC
taught you PRINT, INPUT, variables, colour and sound; Story Builder is where you put
them to work. It starts with one question and grows, a few lines at a time, into a program
you'd show someone.
What you will build:
- A run of questions that remember the player's answers
- A sentence, then a paragraph, then a whole story woven from those answers
- The reveal — separating what the player types from what the program tells
- A title screen that gives the program a name
- A coat of polish: colour, a pause, a beep, a small drawing
7 units. About 4–5 hours. New to programming? Do Meet BASIC first.
Unit roadmap
Asking and combining
Questions in, and the answers begin to combine into a sentence
Telling the story
The reveal, a full narrative, a title screen, and a coat of polish