Getting Started

Hello!
I've been working on this game on and off for a while now since I saw this implementation of Flappy Bird in the mac Finder and thought it'd be fun to do something similar.

The game
It's a little dungeon crawler that plays in the windows file explorer. A console window runs to the side to keep track of things and give a log of events. Think of the files and folders as the playing pieces, and the console windows as the DM keeping track of everything.

How it works
The game generates an initial set of files and folders, then watches for any changes within those. When anything is created, moved, deleted, or renamed, the game attempts to interpret that as a game action. For example, the player can drag and drop the folder which represents their character into another folder which represents a new room, the game will notice this, update its state, and generate the contents of the new room.

What it looks like
Here's a clip of a new game starting. The player looks in an adjacent room (by going through the folder shortcut to that room) and sees that it's unexplored. Then they move their character into that room by dragging and dropping the character folder into the adjacent room. Once inside the room you can see that the contents have been generated; some cabbages and doors to other rooms. The player then eats the cabbages (by deleting their files), losing health to the putrid cabbage and gaining health from the fresh cabbage.

Progress
The bulk of the work has been getting the file system interactions working properly, making sure nothing unexpected surprises the game and crashes it. It's been pretty interesting messing around with it and seeing what I can actually get to work (I found that renaming a folder programmatically could lead to two folders appearing, one with the old name and one with the new name. To get around this I had to give the explorer a little nudge to tell it to refresh itself).
Next I'll be adding stuff to actually do. Combat is already in, but monster population is not, so that's next.

Other games
This isn't a completely novel idea, there have been a few similar projects in the past. There's Dungeons and Directories which is a text adventure in the file explorer (and beat everyone else to the best name), and Folder Dungeon which creates its own file explorer!

Name
I currently don't have a decent name, so suggestions are welcome.