Turtle Tuesdays Challenge for July 2026

Let’s create a text-based adventure!

This month, Turtle Tuesdays will be totally different! You’ll embark on a month-long coding project in Logo. We’re going to create a text-based adventure program. (Get the 14-day Logo trial version here, if you don’t already have Logo.)

We’ll get you started and you can come back to this page every few days to get new hints and snippets of code to use. Some steps are easy and won’t take much time. Other parts are a bit more complicated, but we’ll guide you every step of the way. By the end of the month, you’ll have an adventure you’ll be proud of.

To do this project, you will need to know how to write procedures and create variables. If you haven’t done this before, you can follow the instructions in the Logo Works: Lessons in Logo book, which you can access with your Logo login code from this page.

Click to expand and read each section of the guide below to create your adventure game. New sections will be available every few days, so check back often.

Read First: About the Project

Together, we’ll create a text-based adventure game. The adventure will take place in a Mystery Mansion. You will enter commands to move from room to room, look at what’s in each room, explore items to get more details, take items that are useful, and eventually solve the mystery.

We’ll give you tips every step of the way. Your adventure can be as simple or as complex as you want, but it’s best to start with a simple plan and build on it after the basic program works.

This project will use property lists. If you haven’t used property lists before, no worries. You will soon learn how useful they can be. This adventure game is a perfect opportunity to use property lists. Rooms have properties, and the objects in them have properties.

The great thing about the design we will use is that you can easily create an entirely different adventure game by changing information in just two procedures. In October, you could turn it into a Haunted House. In December, it could become Santa’s Village.

There are many steps to this project. Every few days, you can open up the next step on this page.

You may find it useful to team up with someone as you create your program. Bouncing ideas off another person can make your project better. Your adventure “buddy” doesn’t have to be a programmer, just someone who is interested in your project and willing to help you think through it.

FYI: One of the earliest and most popular text adventure games was Zork, released 49 years ago (1977) to run on a PDP-10 mainframe computer. It was developed at MIT a little after Logo was created there. Read more about Zork.

Let’s get started! Go to Step 1.

Step 1: Create a map of the rooms in your mansion.

Shown at the right is a sample map of a mansion. It will serve as our guide as we code the adventure.

Your first job is to create a map of rooms in your mansion. There don’t need to be many rooms. Start with just a few. You can always add or remove rooms later. You don’t have to use the rooms shown here.

The only rules are:
• Each room has to share a wall with at least one other room.
• The name of the room can’t have a space in it. Use an underscore character instead of a space.

Come back in a couple of days to see how to use property lists in Step 2 so you can move from room to room in your mansion.

Click to download a PDF of Step 1.

What if you have questions?

If you have any questions about coding your adventure, just ask us. We can look at your program and figure out why things aren’t working as you want. Let us know you would like help with your program and we will be in touch. Use this form: www.terrapinlogo.com/forms/share.html